Starting on a small scale in 1939, Chitale is a name to reckon with in the dairy sector today. Initially, it was involved into drawing milk manually, pasteurizing it mechanically and supplying it locally, but today Chitale has deployed cutting edge technologies that has helped simplify and hasten the day-to-day processes. Systematic organization, methodical planning and forecasting have been the key to its success.

The company processes 400,000 liters of milk everyday; cream, butter and yogurt are its other important products. All this calls for a production set up that works non-stop 24x7x365. The most critical aspect in this business is the processing of milk that needs to take place within a short span of two to four hours, after which the milk contaminates unless it is treated and preserved. This led to the need for Chitale to be functional at all times, which in turn meant that the dairy’s IT infrastructure had to be available at all times, for which all of its servers had to be duplicated with data backup facilities. To meet this requirement they deployed VMware Infrastructure to consolidate its two widely spread data centers into one.

Early days hurdles
The company has deployed a homegrown ERP solution to take care of its entire milk processing function. Explains Vishvas Chitale, Director of Chitale Dairy, “Entire process from milk collection to dispatching is handled through homegrown ERP solution. Virtual machines run over this ERP to capture factory data. This is a 24X7 process. So, we have to ensure 100% redundancy. We also have one backup machine for every machine.”

But if even one of its servers went down, the IT team had to do a physical installation, which took anywhere between six to seven hours to bring the server online. This meant excessive pressure on Chitale Dairy’s IT staff and also lack in efficiency. The company faced operational challenges. With the business operating 10 physical servers across two data centers in a town 500 kilometers from the nearest large city, they found it expensive and hard to source qualified support staff for their IT team.

Virtualization and Consolidation
“We realized that virtualization will help us create snapshots. During any disaster, moving from one machine to another would become much easier. There will be better availability of systems and better productivity altogether,” explains Chitale.
In 2005, Chitale Dairy began evaluating ways of streamlining and enhancing its technology environment. The business decided to implement VMware server virtualization to provide the required availability and disaster-recovery capabilities. “We determined that if a server became corrupted, we would need six or seven hours to fully restore it. Using VMware High Availability (HA), we could reduce this to just 10 minutes,” he adds.

In June 2007, the company consolidated its environment to three physical servers operating from a single data center. These were used to host 20 virtual servers running multiple production applications and operating systems, including 64-bit Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.
The company started with primary data controller, tested the environment and then during the night, when there is little or no activity, the IT team successfully converted physical servers into virtual ones.

Before rolling out the final project, the company started a pilot project that was divided into two phases. In the first phase, it got only 8 licenses to get the feel of virtualization. Later in second stage, all applications were brought under one roof. Finally, the company used VMware Infrastructure, to consolidate its two widely separated data centers into one, leading to a significant improvement in application availability and reliability.
The ESX host was deployed in 20 to 30 minutes and setting up VIM server took about two hours. The most time consuming part was to convert physical servers to virtual ones.

VMware infrastructure
The company did virtualization on Tyan servers running on AMD CPUs. Later it moved to Dell blades as they realized that it has better scalability.
VMware consists of ESX server i.e. Host and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM). The dairy has installed ESX on Dell blade and Tyan servers connected to iSCSI and FC storage for data storage. It converted the old Primary Domain Controller (PDC) using Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) tools.

All the servers are available from Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC) and they can delete or restore a server at the flick of a button. They can also take snapshots, clone fine tuned servers and deploy them in minutes.

Smooth processing
The Dairy reduced its server hardware acquisition cost by 50%, software acquisition cost by 75%, and cut power consumption into half.
“After consolidation, even if one server/blade is down, no process is affected at all. Production has increased. There is no downtime,” says Chitale. The new solution has a feature where it shuts down certain blades when not in use or not required. This reduces the power consumption.

With this deployment, its environment has now become highly scalable. It is able to support another 20 virtual servers on its existing hardware to service its growth of 15% year-on-year and expansion into new lines of business.
Moreover, the new solution has streamlined and enhanced Chitale’s technology environment, and improved system reliability and high availability while constraining server sprawl.

The biggest problem was to have skilled IT resources to support two data centers located in regional India. But now, deploying VMware has enabled the business to consolidate to a single data center and administer its virtual server environment from a centralized location.
Chitale were running both Windows and Linux machines. Secondly, some machines were running on AMD CPUs and a few on Intel. It had different servers and different CPUs, hence standardization was the greatest challenge. “Through virtualization, machines became CPU independent and portability of server became much easier,” explains Chitale.

It has also helped reduce server deployment time from three weeks to three hours and the time taken to restore a corrupted server from six or seven hours to 10 minutes.
After reaping the benefits of consolidation of data centers, the company is now looking ahead for storage virtualization. It is using FC storage and ISCSI for backup. Now the company plans for storage virtualization to get the best out of it.