Sobha Renaissance Information Technology

About

Sobha Renaissance Information Technology (SRIT), a Bangalore based global software products and solutions provider is world's first SSE-CMM LEVEL 5 company.

It is focused at both Software Productisation & IT Services. Their industry vertical focus areas are HealthCare, Telecom, Government & General Enterprise. They provide clients end-to-end IT Solutions & a host of Systems Integration services. SRIT has been highly successful in developing some of the most path breaking innovations in their focus domains of Telecom, Healthcare and Enterprise.

Problems Faced

Sobha Renaissance IT (SRIT) started off as implementing Microsoft technologies for their IT infrastructure. But as they grew, they started facing the problem of effectively managing their network. This growth led to increased licensing fees per user. Hence, a solution based on Free / Open Source Software seemed to be the only way out to effectively cut costs! And they chose DeepRoot Linux as their IT partner in this endeavour.

Earlier Infrastructure

  • Microsoft Exchange - to handle email
  • Microsoft Windows 2003 - Active Directory Services (ADS) - as a domain controller to authenticate desktop users
  • Microsoft Windows 2003 - ADS - as a backup domain controller
  • Miscrosft Windows 2003 - for DNS & DHCP services

Solutions

We took up the challenge of migrating the entire IT set-up from the Microsoft platform to GNU/Linux while, at the same time, ensuring that end-user convenience is not compromised.

Overview of the setup

DeepRoot Linux has helped deploy four servers at SRIT:

  • Out of these four, one is the main deepOfix mail server which ships with LDAP (Light Weight Directory Access Protocol) along with a host of other features like SMTP/ POP3/ IMAP services, intelligent & flexible Account Management, Web-based email, pre-integrated anti-virus and anti-spam tools etc.
  • The LDAP service of the mail server is replicated across the rest of the three servers in the network. In this way, an account added once to the mail server becomes available to all the servers without the added overhead of creating or managing the same users on multiple servers.
  • Two other servers take care of providing authentication and domain services to Windows desktops around the SRIT network. The primary domain controller (PDC) and backup domain controller (BDC) work together to make this happen.
  • The backup domain controller also incorporates the DHCP and DNS servers.
  • The fourth server is a backup mail server that servers to provide a level of redundancy for the main mail server.

Finer Details

  • The DHCP server helps in generating the IP and gateway from a pool of IPs. It helps in generating a single IP for the users of a particular mail server and facilitates user identification. SRIT's main area of concern was the lack of a robust DHCP server which was well taken care of by DeepRoot Linux.
  • They also needed some well-deserved customisations in the web-based email feature of the deepOfix mail server. One of these included a feature that allowed users to change their passwords without having to log into web-mail.

Impact

The solutions provided by DeepRoot impacted SRIT's business in a huge way.

  • SRIT was able to save on large expenses related to software purchase,  licensing and support. Their cost savings by using deepOfix were in the order of at least 90% of what they would've spent on proprietary software.
  • It is often said that FOSS-based solutions can not effectively replace proprietary software on a large scale. This is one example where the openness and flexibility of Free / Open Source Software was able to deliver immense value to the organisation and its users.
  • SRIT has grown from a few hundred users to more than 2000 users. The scalability of the deepOfix Mail Server made such a high scalability easily possible.