Lately we have been running a cartoonography contest on our website. This is about captioning a cartoon of a CIO surrounded by a mess of wires in his data centre. He is trying to direct his IT manager on how to plug leaks on the network. This was exactly Boman Nakra’s state when he joined Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank (CA-CIB)– then known as Calyon Bank.

CA-CIB has been present in India since 1981 and provides various financing and investment banking services through six branches across the country. It is amongst the top five foreign banks in the country for capital markets products. It is also a leader in treasury markets and provides services to leading Indian companies and financial institutions.

The challenge
The servers in CA-CIB, prior to consolidation, comprised of many open slotted angle racks. The IT equipments including core LAN switches, routers, firewall and servers were not in contiguous racks and were spread across various open racks. The cabling in the data centre was untagged and very messy, making it difficult to maintain the equipment. Also, there was no patching in place to organize the tangled cabling. A lot of time was wasted to identify the cables and at times an outsourced specialist was needed. This had a huge effect on downtime, also because there was no redundancy in place.

To make matters worse, there was no documentation that could help the team identify the cables. There were many defunct servers too, that were still lying in racks, taking up expensive real estate. The capacity of the data centre and server room was not utilised properly.

In order to achieve the above mentioned objectives it was imperative to proceed with a consolidation project.

The solution
For the solution, Nakra found solace in standards. “The solution was standardisation. How much of equipments can be standardised, given the framework of the organisation”, he says. As a part of the consolidation process, all old, aging and non standard servers were identified and removed. Eight out of eleven open equipment racks were removed and replaced with standardised racks. Proper planning has ensured that all related racks were placed together. Following the incorporation of new racks, the IT Equipments have been installed as per functionality. For instance, the communication related equipment like routers/ switches/firewall/IPS have been grouped together as per their functionality. IT Equipment relating to regulatory systems have also been installed in a separate rack.

It involved careful planning and execution to complete this process to ensure that there was no downtime involved. Thus, most of the migration was done over weekends and after office hours. It was also because of Nakra’s experienced staff, that he was able to achieve this huge transformation without a glitch.

The benefits
“Better management, better control and better compliance”, says Nakra. Reorganisation has benefited the CIO, his team and the organisation as a whole. There has been a 25-percent reduction in the real estate being used for IT equipment. The space saved has been allotted for better seating arrangement of the IT staff. The organisation has also resulted in lower power consumption, cutting the energy bills by close to 10-percent (estimated at 1.2 KW per rack).

Going forward
There are more than 46 servers in the data centre of the bank in Mumbai – these include tower mount and older technology servers. Also, there are many servers that are there in the six branches across the country. Nakra plans to consolidate all these servers in the data centre in Mumbai for ease of management and better uptime. The MPLS network for this purpose has been collapsed and re-created with Bharti’s help.