FAST FACTS
Customer: Growing Opportunity
Industry: Micro Finance (MFI)
Geography: Pan India
Business Challenge: To consolidate hardware resources in order to build a high-performance platform that is flexible, secure, scalable, and cost-effective
Solution: Growing Opportunity deployed its mission-critical applications, including portfolio management application and mail server on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
Software: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, and other open source software components, including openLDAP, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, eMerge (T24 – Community Banking), SAMBA file server, Apache Web Server, MySQL, DNS & DHCP Servers
Hardware: Intel Xeon processor-based servers from Dell
Benefits: Increased flexibility, eliminated vendor lock-in, decreased hardware and power costs by 50 percent, simplified management, increased scalability and performance, improved server utilization, operational efficiency, and business agility
“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization not only improved our operational efficiency and reduced our costs but, more importantly, it made our business more agile to rapidly respond to changing business needs, and helped us to build the right infrastructure platform for tomorrow.”
Immanuel Jeyaraj, head – Information Technology, Growing Opportunity
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BACKGROUND
Growing Opportunity is a micro finance organization in India dedicated to helping the working poor escape poverty. Through income-generating loans, business training and social development, the company works closely with its clients to expand business, grow income, improve its financial security, and provide better education and nutrition for families. Since its inception in 2006, Growing Opportunity has provided more than 65,000 poor entrepreneurs an opportunity to improve their life.
For the poor to be economically and socially secure for the long-term, they need more than just a bank loan. Therefore, Growing Opportunity helps each client to leverage their loan to its fullest potential by helping each client to create a business plan for their venture and provide ongoing business training, motivation, and goal setting to assist them in growing and strengthening their business. In addition to the economic development, Growing Opportunity also helps clients to grow their personal development and understand issues in the surrounding community, leading to the social development of the community.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Since its inception in 2006, Growing Opportunity has been committed to its goal to help the poor people in rural areas to set up their small businesses with a workforce of just 300. “In the next year, we want to reach 150,000 clients and take our employee count to 500,” said Immanuel Jeyaraj, head, IT, Growing Opportunity. “Our IT infrastructure setup was previously not ready for meeting such aggressive targets.”
Growing Opportunity’s IT environment was not professional. The network, hardware platform, infrastructure, as well as the application software were in a primitive stage. The organization had four outdated servers running some of its important applications. “Our IT environment was not at all stable and scalable,” said Immanuel Jeyaraj, head, Information Technology at Growing Opportunity. “So, we decided to revamp the infrastructure to make it more enterprise-class.”
In addition to the need to revamp the infrastructure, Growing Opportunity was also concerned with the cost-effectiveness of the solution. The IT team began evaluating various infrastructure solutions that could increase performance and scalability, but that could also meet its budgeting goals. “Due to exorbitant costs, we ruled out the option of using blade servers as the hardware platform,” said Jeyaraj. To obtain high performance and scalability at lower costs, Growing Opportunity decided to utilize the power of a virtualization solution to revamp its IT infrastructure.
SOLUTION
Growing Opportunity's IT team evaluated three virtualization solutions from different vendors, including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. “Microsoft’s solution was ruled out because of the lack of features and flexibility,” said Jeyaraj. VMware’s option was also ruled out as it was extremely costly, while also lacking flexibility due to its proprietary nature.
In line with the IT team’s criteria of flexibility, scalability, cost, performance, and stability of the solution, Growing Opportunity's IT team chose Red Hat as its trusted technology partner and decided to utilize Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was an ideal fit because in addition to its cost-effectiveness, it allowed Growing Opportunity to take full advantage of its hardware, while also allowing the organization to scale with future datacenter growth. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux would provide Growing Opportunity with added power for its datacenter with extended security, performance, and ecosystem benefits.
“Implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was very critical for our IT deployment as it was the first time we were implementing a virtualization solution,” said Jeyaraj. The proof of concept (POC) done using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was highly successful. “We were quite impressed by the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, such as Live Migration and System Scheduling,” said Jeyaraj. “Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager's features come out of the box, unlike that of other proprietary vendors,” he added.
The implementation of the solution was smooth and simple. The organization’s IT team quickly understood the entire concept of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. Currently, the IT team has deployed eMerge (T24 Community Banking), its Portfolio Management System and Zimbra mail server on the virtualization platform. “We rebuilt the entire infrastructure instead of migrating it for better performance,” said Jeyaraj. The deployment was completed in few weeks time and has exhibited exceptional stability and performance.
Extremely pleased by the solution’s performance, the organization would be deploying more applications on the virtualization platform in near future. “We would be deploying our Biometrics, accounting and workflow software on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform in coming months,” said Jeyaraj. The IT team is also planning to build its Disaster Recovery center based on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform for achieving business continuity.
BENEFITS
“With Red Hat’s cutting-edge virtualization solution, we were able to extract tremendous value from our applications,” said Jeyaraj. “Red Hat freed us from vendor lock-in, and enabled us to utilize the existing hardware platforms that delivered flexibility and high performance,” he added.
Growing Opportunity obtained all the typical benefits of server consolidation, such as improved server utilization, reduced hardware and power costs, and simplified management, amongst others. Apart from these benefits, Red Hat’s solution enabled us to rapidly respond to changing business needs. “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has helped our business to become more agile and scale to meet our business needs in the future,” said Jeyaraj.
The operational efficiency of the IT team has also significantly improved, as there is tremendous savings in time and effort due to simplified monitoring and management of the system. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also improved the reliability of the entire IT setup of the organization. Overall performance and scalability of the infrastructure has improved multifold since the implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
There are significant cost savings that the organization realized due to the implementation of Red Hat’s solution. “The total cost of ownership (TCO) of the IT infrastructure has been reduced by at least 50 percent due to the implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization,” said Jeyaraj. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has also helped Growing Opportunity to significantly improve its ability to serve new customers and expand its rural reach. “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is scalable and can handle our expanding user base,” said Jeyaraj. Overall, this has helped the organization to achieve greater ROI from its IT infrastructure.
In summary, Red Hat provided Growing Opportunity with an enterprise-class solution at an affordable price without any compromise on performance and scalability parameters. “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization not only improved our operational efficiency and reduced costs, but more importantly it made our business more agile to rapidly respond to the changing business needs and helped us to build the right infrastructure platform for tomorrow,” said Jeyaraj.
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