Infosys Supercharges Application Performance With Hitachi

Overview

Challenge

• Ensure outstanding performance for hundreds of internal applications that support over 300,000 Infosys employees around the globe.

Solution

• Upgrade enterprise storage and converged infrastructure to take advantage of faster, higher density drives and more powerful servers.

Outcome

• Reduced average application response times to less than a millisecond, ensuring seamless interactivity to help Infosys teams serve clients more efficiently.

Challenge

When your business is built around providing IT business solutions that help clients deliver business and digital transformation, you can’t afford to have IT systems that let you down. Hundreds of thousands of Infosys consultants around the world need fast, reliable access to the company’s digital services to ensure that routine administrative tasks don’t distract them from delivering value to clients.

“As a 40-year-old company, our managed IT services naturally include a mix of legacy systems and modern applications,” explains Vadiraj Adiga, Associate Vice President – Enterprise Platform Management at Infosys. “Our strategy is to compose these platforms into a microservices architecture that is oriented around employee-centric services. For example, if a consultant needs to book transport to visit a client in another city, they just need to complete one digital workflow, rather than logging into multiple different systems.”

For this strategy to work effectively, the microservices must be able communicate with each other quickly and reliably. To deliver a seamless interactive experience to the end user, Infosys set a goal of keeping application response times below 10 milliseconds.

Solution

Infosys has been a strong advocate of Hitachi Vantara storage solutions for more than two decades, especially for the large systems of record that the company considers its “crown jewels”.

“We always align our technology refreshes with Hitachi’s roadmap and release cycle,” says Vadiraj Adiga. “That means we always have access to the very latest technology, and it also maximizes the lifespan of our investments before they reach end-of-support.”

So, when the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 reached the market, Infosys was immediately eager to upgrade. The high-density 30TB NVMe drives in the VSP 5600 would enable it to consolidate rack space in its data centers, while also promising significantly better performance for all types of application workloads.

As part of the upgrade, Infosys also implemented Hitachi Ops Center Administrator to streamline storage provisioning as part of its toolkit for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Meanwhile, Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer is used to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues.

“Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer is a great tool for performance analysis,” says Vadiraj Adiga. “The only issue is that the VSP 5600 is so fast, we don’t have any bottlenecks! Before, we spent a lot of time using performance tools to optimize our storage landscape. Now, we don’t have to.”

In addition to the business-critical systems running on the VSP 5600, Infosys also runs SAP solutions on multiple Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI integrated systems. “When we originally migrated to SAP HANA in 2014, I believe it was the largest single-instance database in the world,” says Vadiraj Adiga. “And when we subsequently upgraded to SAP S/4HANA, our resource requirements increased yet again. The latest generation of Hitachi UCP CI integrated systems give us 12TB of capacity, which ensures our SAP applications have the headroom for future growth.”

Finally, Infosys also uses Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to manage a host of network attached storage (NAS) systems for file and document archiving. “HCP gives us a very flexible way to standardize our storage network and reduce maintenance costs,” says Vadiraj Adiga. “It has been such a success for archival that we are now considering other use cases, such as using it to build an S3-compatible object storage platform.”

Outcome

Infosys’ adoption of latest-generation Hitachi storage and converged infrastructure has enabled the company to smash its application performance targets. For workloads running on the VSP 5600, average response times are now below 1 millisecond, and even worst-case response times are below 5 milliseconds.

“The Hitachi VSP 5600 is running our applications at least 10 times faster than our SLA requires, and 70% to 90% faster than our previous-generation storage,” says Vadiraj Adiga. “That means our microservices can communicate almost instantaneously, so we can provide a seamless user experience for our employees.”

The higher-density 30TB NVMe drives have also enabled Infosys to make significant savings in its data centers — reducing space requirements from eight racks to just two and cutting electricity and air-conditioning costs by 50 to 60%. “Saving energy doesn’t just save costs, it also helps us move towards carbon neutrality, which is a big part of our Environmental, Social and Governance goals,” explains Vadiraj Adiga.

Infosys sees its new infrastructure platforms as a continuation of its long and successful partnership with Hitachi. “We don’t choose Hitachi automatically — we always evaluate other vendors’ solutions too,” comments Vadiraj Adiga. “But the level of support and reliability we get from Hitachi is second to none. For example, we recently decommissioned an older Hitachi array which had reached end-of-support — it had been running continuously for 12 years with 100% uptime and no issues at all. That’s a level of quality we can trust.”