Shriram Value Services: At early stages of enabling SDDC

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Shriram Value Services, the IT & ITeS arm of Shriram Group has been adopting the latest technology for its data centre. Sendilkumar Venkatesan, VP -IT, Shriram Value Services elaborates on the company’s data centre initiatives

How far has your firm evolved in the journey to the Software Defined Data Centre (which components such as compute, storage and networking are now software defined)?
Novac Technology Solutions (NTS) is a 100 per cent subsidiary IT arm of Shriram Capital. Shriram Group is predominantly in finance and the insurance sectors.

We are in the initial stage for redefining our data centre to the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). As applications are moving towards the cloud, SDDC plays a major role in the area of agility, flexibility and availability.

As businesses are transforming towards digital, we need to ensure that resources should not be a barrier. We had done proper capacity plan in all three pillars of infrastructure, including compute, storage and network. Most of our applications are in the virtualised environment, which helps us to deploy the applications in just a few minutes. We have also deployed blade servers with a composable architecture, which has single infrastructure in a simplified manner.

On the storage front, we are consolidating multiple storage appliances and will have a single dashboard where we can provision the data with a self-service portal.

Which are some of the key lessons learnt in the journey towards a software defined data centre?
We are executing in a phased manner as it is a live environment. We have divided the infrastructure into three pillars, namely compute, storage and network. Currently, we are concentrating more on compute and storage. Once this is stabilised, we will then enable Software Defined Network (SDN). SDN will be useful for us to monitor the overall network centrally and can manage and control the network traffic easily and effectively.

How have you evolved your team’s technical skills to adapt to a software defined environment?
It is a challenge for internal teams as these are new technologies. However, we have a strong partner support which helps our team on regular technology updation and training. Further, we have taken their service support.

What are some of the key benefits that you have seen due to your data centres becoming software defined?
As the applications are moving towards the cloud, both public and private, SSDC will help us to deploy the applications instantly and will help us to manage and control the data centre with clear visibility and scalability. SDDC will help us to enable hybrid cloud and multi-tenant environment with proper security measures.

Energy management is a key cost component in DCs. What steps have
you taken to reduce the same ?
As infrastructure is controlled by software, resources are effectively used and virtualised, which will reduce the infrastructure and in turn will save the energy.

How are you making emerging technologies (AI, Edge Computing, Kubernetes, Containers, SD-WANs) work for you?
We are moving our current applications to micro-services which will enable us to deploy the applications easily on cloud, easy maintenance and increase in performance. Edge computing plays a major role as the resources earlier which are idle are used effectively. Currently, all our new branches are in SD-WAN which helps us to manage traffic and connectivity effectively with proper security in a public cloud environment. SDWAN helps in bandwidth aggregation, centralised easy management by pushing policies across locations.

What is your future roadmap?
It is inevitable for organisations to move on to the cloud. Moving to cloud SDDN helps us to control and manage the IT resources where it will aid the business by providing necessary IT resources on time and enable scaling based on the needs.

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