Success Stories
Infrastructure Services: Value Added Offshoring Services involving 40 mission critical servers for a Leading Utility Provider
Client:
One of the largest utility for gas and electricity supply.Challenge:
- Patching of all the client’s mission critical IGMS application servers before winter season to avoid any performance and security issues.
Solution:
- Servers were patched with the latest patch bundle and were recycled to confirm no hidden issues.
Results:
- Successfully patched 40 servers and completed testing of all the sub-components of the application servers for failover within three weeks without any major outage.
The client is responsible for the national gas transmission system with over 126,000 KM of distribution pipes delivering gas to millions of homes, offices and factories. In this scenario, proactive monitoring of infrastructure is critical as even a low downtime can lead to major power outages nationwide. To improve its already safe and reliable service, the client launched the Integrated Gas Management System (IGMS) tool, which manages the physical and commercial distribution of gas.
The client is a huge account with numerous servers operating on different environments. IGMS servers are one of the super critical client applications for the business. These servers are designed for 99.91% availability excluding planned outages.
The client outsourced its IT infrastructure maintenance to CSC in 2004 and patching of all its IGMS HP-UX servers was offshored to the Managed Computing Services (MCS) India team in mid 2005. To start with, the India team conducted a knowledge transfer session with the client’s earlier vendor to become familiar with the client’s various operational and day-to-day tasks.
Challenge
- Getting an outage from business was critical as IGMS HP-UX servers are a part of super-critical infrastructure support with an SLA of 99.91%
- Completing server patching before the winter season as the workload increases and the system availability becomes more critical due to higher gas consumption during winters
- Ensuring business availability while releasing the new version of IGMS application
- Rectifying configuration mismatches in the servers so that it does not impact applications on other servers
Winning Performance
The offshore team with around nine resources supported 40 mission critical HP-UX servers. The team first verified the previous patch version on all the IGMS HP-UX servers using the Software Inventory (IPD or Install Product Database) tool. The tool not only helped analyse the actual patch version and find the possible bugs in the applications, but also ensured integrity of applications after the new patches were applied.
Before deploying patches, the team ensured that the identified patches do not cause any undesired effects to the client environment. Starting the work in August 2006, the team completed server patching for 37 out of 40 servers in just three weeks. The rest three servers pending for business approval were also patched by October. As an ongoing process, the team ensures that the client is up-to-date on patches.
The results speak for themselves:
- Total 40 client’s mission critical HP-UX servers were patched in production environment
- A real-time disaster was avoided by testing all the sub-components of the IGMS application for failover