Download PDF
Tata Consultancy Services Success Story
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
- Networks & Connectivity - Routers & Bridges
- Networks & Connectivity - Software-Defined Networking
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Building Automation & Control
- Advanced Metering Infrastructure
- Augmented Reality
- Computer Vision
- Digital Twin
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Inventory Management
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
- Virtual Reality
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- Hardware Design & Engineering Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was engaged by a leading life and pensions company, headquartered in London, to build out a new data center. The client's existing data center incorporated a diverse range of technologies and systems, resulting in a complex network that demanded intensive management and extraordinary amounts of time to bring a new service to market while increasing operation costs. Infrastructure age and complexity also restricted the company’s ability to scale to meet growing business requirements. More than 8,000 users needed access to enterprise applications and resources that resided on mainframes and servers, and storage demands were steadily increasing. The data center network also had to support quality of service for voice traffic. The new data center had to be able to support multitenancy and enable a path to SDN. At the same time, TCS needed to migrate all applications and millions of policies to the new data center with no changes to IP addressing of the application systems.
About The Customer
The client is a leading life and pensions company, headquartered in London, and offers a range of retirement and pension services to more than five million customers. To maintain its lead in a highly competitive market, the client had launched a service improvement program to accelerate time to market for new services, improve delivery efficiency, and remain flexible as new market opportunities arise. Its existing data center incorporated a diverse range of technologies and systems. The Cisco data network had evolved over many years, resulting in fragmented VLAN Trunk Protocol (VTP) domain networks with multiple core switches and a mix of two-tier and flat network architectures. Point-to-point WAN links connected three data centers and 11 office locations, which altogether used more than 1,100 network devices from various vendors.
The Solution
TCS designed the new network with redundant Brocade MLX Core Routers at the data center network core. The Brocade MLX Series Core Routers support Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF), which enabled TCS to provide multitenancy and circumvent the IP address issues. The VRF technology separates internal traffic from external traffic into the correct physical connections through the firewalls. Brocade MLX Series Core Routers also support OpenFlow, providing an SDN solution for programmatic control of the network. Using Brocade VDX® Switches and Brocade VCS® Fabric technology, TCS consolidated the aggregation and access layers, which connect to the core through 4x10 GbE links. The Brocade VCS Fabric technology supports VLAN tagging which solved the problems associated with overlapping Layer 2 VLAN IDs across the data center. The Brocade VDX Switches provide 1/10 Gbps connectivity to servers and for uplinks, while providing the option for future deployment of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
Operational Impact
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Real-time In-vehicle Monitoring
The telematic solution provides this vital premium-adjusting information. The solution also helps detect and deter vehicle or trailer theft – as soon as a theft occurs, monitoring personnel can alert the appropriate authorities, providing an exact location.“With more and more insurance companies and major fleet operators interested in monitoring driver behaviour on the grounds of road safety, efficient logistics and costs, the market for this type of device and associated e-business services is growing rapidly within Italy and the rest of Europe,” says Franco.“The insurance companies are especially interested in the pay-per-use and pay-as-you-drive applications while other organisations employ the technology for road user charging.”“One million vehicles in Italy currently carry such devices and forecasts indicate that the European market will increase tenfold by 2014.However, for our technology to work effectively, we needed a highly reliable wireless data network to carry the information between the vehicles and monitoring stations.”
Case Study
Safety First with Folksam
The competitiveness of the car insurance market is driving UBI growth as a means for insurance companies to differentiate their customer propositions as well as improving operational efficiency. An insurance model - usage-based insurance ("UBI") - offers possibilities for insurers to do more efficient market segmentation and accurate risk assessment and pricing. Insurers require an IoT solution for the purpose of data collection and performance analysis
Case Study
Smooth Transition to Energy Savings
The building was equipped with four end-of-life Trane water cooled chillers, located in the basement. Johnson Controls installed four York water cooled centrifugal chillers with unit mounted variable speed drives and a total installed cooling capacity of 6,8 MW. Each chiller has a capacity of 1,6 MW (variable to 1.9MW depending upon condenser water temperatures). Johnson Controls needed to design the equipment in such way that it would fit the dimensional constraints of the existing plant area and plant access route but also the specific performance requirements of the client. Morgan Stanley required the chiller plant to match the building load profile, turn down to match the low load requirement when needed and provide an improvement in the Energy Efficiency Ratio across the entire operating range. Other requirements were a reduction in the chiller noise level to improve the working environment in the plant room and a wide operating envelope coupled with intelligent controls to allow possible variation in both flow rate and temperature. The latter was needed to leverage increased capacity from a reduced number of machines during the different installation phases and allow future enhancement to a variable primary flow system.
Case Study
Automated Pallet Labeling Solution for SPR Packaging
SPR Packaging, an American supplier of packaging solutions, was in search of an automated pallet labeling solution that could meet their immediate and future needs. They aimed to equip their lines with automatic printer applicators, but also required a solution that could interface with their accounting software. The challenge was to find a system that could read a 2D code on pallets at the stretch wrapper, track the pallet, and flag any pallets with unread barcodes for inspection. The pallets could be single or double stacked, and the system needed to be able to differentiate between the two. SPR Packaging sought a system integrator with extensive experience in advanced printing and tracking solutions to provide a complete traceability system.
Case Study
Transforming insurance pricing while improving driver safety
The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the car insurance industry on a scale not seen since the introduction of the car itself. For decades, premiums have been calculated using proxy-based risk assessment models and historical data. Today, a growing number of innovative companies such as Quebec-based Industrielle Alliance are moving to usage-based insurance (UBI) models, driven by the advancement of telematics technologies and smart tracking devices.
Case Study
MasterCard Improves Customer Experience Through Self-Service Data Prep
Derek Madison, Leader of Business Financial Support at MasterCard, oversees the validation of transactions and cash between two systems, whether they’re MasterCard owned or not. He was charged with identifying new ways to increase efficiency and improve MasterCard processes. At the outset, the 13-person team had to manually reconcile system interfaces using reports that resided on the company’s mainframe. Their first order of business each day was to print 20-30 individual, multi-page reports. Using a ruler to keep their place within each report, they would then hand-key the relevant data, line by line, into Excel for validation. “We’re talking about a task that took 40-80 hours each week,” recalls Madison, “As a growing company with rapidly expanding product offerings, we had to find a better way to prepare this data for analysis.”