How Virtualisation Helped Vodafone IT?

VodafoneIndia, with a subscriber base of more than 150 million customers serviced through a network of over 115,000 sites has been growing since it took over from Hutchinson Essar. As telecom inIndiahas been growing multi-fold, telcos are constantly sprucing up IT to support their spreading presence, transforming networks, business models and core value propositions. With the upsurge in the growth in the number of subscribers and new service offerings, CIOs and Senior IT managers carry the mandate of deploying the best technologies to enable the business and operations in achieving the desired goals.

Business Need

The IT team at Vodafone inIndiaobserved that the organisation had grown its presence with 23 circles across the country, and there was a need to centralize IT management into one core data center, to drive better collaboration among the circles in a controlled environment. Antony Thomas, CIO, VodafoneIndia, and his team had one solution on the table – going big on virtualisation. Thomas and his team have been instrumental in planning the IT infrastructure in Vodafone’s two large businesses – enterprise business and mobile money business. All these businesses were scattered and running as independent profit centers. Each of these centers had its own set of applications and own set of servers. The goal was to centralize them without taking away the freedom of operations or the agility they were looking for. Thomas adds, “The biggest project would be virtualisation implementation on application based on circles which were,

earlier, scattered in 23 different circles.” It was a mix of intelligent implementation to bring together 24 applications which were running in silos and were purely used by the circle teams to run operations in various circles.

The biggest challenge in centralization was to ensure that the circles got access to the servers and let them do what they had to. Often, it has been observed that centralization disallows them that freedom. The business challenge was also to let these businesses to react quickly to the market. Thomas says, “Although we could have controlled a lot of

it in terms of policies, at the end of the day, when people have administrative rights of the local servers, the issues that crop up are: what has been installed and by whom?”

Thomas points out three cardinal requirements to have ensured freedom in such a scenario: 1) Access to servers; 2) Access to resources; and 3) Access to operational services.

Technology Solution

The project had two phases to it – one was to ensure that Vodafone had the best platform in place which was available for everyone to use. The second step was to identify the applications that could be taken in and the third was to migrate one application after the other without any disruption into the virtual environment.

VMware is strategic partner to Vodafone globally. So, the experience of working with  VMware and its proven record did not leave Vodafone with much to evaluate.

Manish Israni, Vice President-IT Infrastructure andDataCenter, VodafoneIndia, says, “When we identified the 30 applications for migration, we realised that we needed a

product or landscape that would provide us Wintel, Linux, Oracle or SQL combination to be running on a platform where ease of elasticity is required—not only for these applications but any other function we want to perform in this specific capacity. So, based on our internal thought process and internal assessment, we found that VMware  VSphere or VMotion combination was not only helping us to create this platform, but also helping us to migrate the data without the circle application.”

The telco explored all the options available and was in several internal discussions. It was decided to take Wintel to virtualisation or cloud on a VMware platform, which could be also get extended to some of its proprietary servers which are not part of this platform. A cost effective solution was a priority and a major factor. Thomas says, “Cost is definitely a factor in any decision we make, because at the end of the day, we have to have a positive business case for anything that we do. What we looked at was total cost of ownership (TCO) over a period of time. Earlier, circles were procuring differently, in a

non standard way. Once we centralized it, there was a standard way of procuring in place with better utilization of space.”

Making a difference to the Business

• Centralized solution for 23 circles
• Faster turnaround to businesses
• Replicable solutions across circles
• Better reporting or analysis
• Eliminated duplication of development cycle
• Better utilization of space
• Cost effective implementation

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