About our Customer
Thermax Group is an INR 5,831 Cr. (822 Million US$) company headquartered in Pune, India. Its business portfolio includes products for heating, cooling, water and waste management, and specialty chemicals.
The systems, products and services developed by Thermax help industry achieve better resource productivity and improve bottom lines, while maintaining a cleaner environment.
They operate globally through 29 international offices and 14 manufacturing facilities – 10 of which are in India and 4 overseas. Its presence spans 88 countries and supports customers through an extensive sales & service network spread over Asia, South East Asia, Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. They have 5,020 total employees across all of its locations.
Challenges- Lack of spend visibility resulted in huge infrastructure costs
Customer’s multiple business applications were critical to their success. Their existing infrastructure posed several challenges to their envisioned growth.
Thermax had its workloads hosted on both Windows and open source environment. The infrastructure was hosted on AWS data center and was managed by an AWS partner. Customer was engaged with various application providers who directly enabled services in their AWS environment. Their Infrastructure team struggled with lack of visibility around the security components for the infrastructure.
Cost & Security Challenges: The third-party operations resulted in security and cost issues. They didn’t have any secure back up and disaster recovery systems.
Commercial Challenges: The existing infrastructure could not scale up or down in real time as per the need which further heavily impacted the costs. Moreover, in absence of any single dashboard/tool to view and track AWS consumption, the team struggled with spotting the reasons for spiked cost spend.
No Visibility of current architecture- The customer didn’t have any visibility regarding their existing infra as the workloads were managed by third party vendor.
Challenged business continuity: Their customers were completely depended on Thermax’s portals to interact with their offerings, and thus they required a solution that could address the challenges with minimal or zero downtime.
Solution- Embee suggested Migration to Azure for better visibility and cost savings
In consultation with Embee, customer understood the need to migrate some of their applications to Azure. The question was how. Embee’s team suggested the solution to Rehost Windows and Linux environment.
Here is the solution implemented by our cloud experts: –
- Rehost of Windows Server, MSSQL server, RHEL server and PostGreSQL.
- Database (MSSQL server and PostGreSQL) query optimization and implementing high availability on IaaS platform helped customer with better transaction performance, I/O operations, reduced wait time for the queries, better user experience and application accessibility.
- Implementation of Azure Enterprise agreement, Windows AHUB and SQL AHUB reduced cost by approx. 35%.
- Azure cost management helped customer estimate future budget and get unified visibility of the operational cost for the resource usage.
- Azure Storage for back-up to overcome the challenges of data-loss and risks.
- Azure Security Centre Standard to provide a holistic security on their Azure infrastructure.
- The customer further configured Azure Functions, Web Apps, SQL Database and Event Grid to maximize their utility of the Azure platform.
Tools and Technologies Used-
- Windows server, RHEL Virtual Machines.
- Azure Monitor
- Azure Security center
- Azure Policy
- Azure load balancer
- Azure Monitor
- Azure Availability set
- Azure Storage
- Azure VPN gateway
- Azure Automation
- Azure Backup
- Azure Site recovery
- Azure Active directory
- Azure RBAC
- Azure cost management
The solution impact: Significant reductions in cost by up to 35%.
The advantages of the solution became visible from day one. Now, the organization enjoys:
- Improved system performance: Microsoft Azure guaranteed 99.9% uptime along with the ability to load-balance between various servers on the backend to ensure smooth performance for users. This also ensured business is always up and available.
- Improved scalability: The ability to scale infrastructure quickly was one of the key requirements from the customer for this project. The implementation of Azure cloud gave them the freedom to leverage the IaaS and PaaS models to use only as much capacity as they require, thereby providing an ideal customer experience to the users.
- Reduced TCO: The cloud-based solution helped the customer drive significant reductions in procurement, implementation, and maintenance costs by up to 35%.
- Modernized Infrastructure: With the infrastructure completely managed by Microsoft Azure, moreover the customer enjoys more feature to make the environment more reliable by deploying the front-end servers on two different racks using Availability Set functionality on Azure.
Sailing smooth with Azure Application Migration
Customer is now reassured with a cost-effective, scalable, reliable cloud solution, saving on major infrastructure costs and provide an unprecedented peace of mind.
The solution is universal. The benefits of such migration are being more widely adopted to reducing costs and attaining the desired scalability and uptime. It can be applied to any organisation running business critical applications with variable utility.
With Embee’s dedicated consultation, robust delivery and the reliability of the Azure platform, customer is also expanding their Azure utilization with Remote Managed Services of their IT infrastructure. This is expected to further increase their Azure footprint.
