Perfetti Van Melle (PVM) India has been one of the significant
beneficiaries of virtualization technologies. PVM India, a leading
global producer of candies and gum, is the third-largest
confectionery manufacturer in the world.
PVM India operated 18 tower servers across several locations to
support eight large sites and 34 smaller sites throughout the
country. These servers consumed huge amounts of power and the
company’s IT team had to travel extensively to ensure each
machine was updated, patched or fixed as the need arose. In
addition, this physical infrastructure was not scalable enough to
meet the long-term business objectives and consumed valuable real
estate. The business also required extensive bandwidth to meet its
data replication requirements.
The challenge was to build a cost-effective, dynamic infrastructure
to replace distributed physical servers that were expensive and
inefficient to manage, consumed large amounts of power, and lacked
the scalability to meet
long term goals.
The virtual benefit
In 2007, PVM India opted to deploy virtualization to resolve these
issues,
prompted largely by an evaluation of new blade servers. By
selecting HP’s
16-blade chassis, the company gave itself the scalability to
support future growth.
Thereafter, HP deployed a virtualized infrastructure based on
VMware
vSphere4 linked by fiber channel to a storage area network into its
primary
data center. The organization is now running 45 virtual machines
on eight blade servers, with capacity to add another eight servers
in the future. This infrastructure is running a 550-user Microsoft
Exchange Server email system, a 250-user Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server collaboration system and two business
applications.
"By migrating from a distributed architecture to a single
site, we have reduced the cost of running our email platform by 60
percent "
- Basant Chaturvedi, Controller IT, PVM India
“Our email and DCMS applications are particularly
critical to the business
and we have had no unplanned downtime since we deployed VMware
three-and a-half years ago,” said Basant Chaturvedi,
Controller IT, PVM India. “By migrating this system from a
distributed architecture to a single site where we can manage it
more easily, by reducing the number of physical servers and
lowering our licensing costs, we have reduced the cost of running
our email platform alone by 60 percent.”
How does virtualization impact the storage needs? “PVM India
may have
consolidated storage requirements for their servers under external
storage
arrays. VMware ensures that when they virtualize these workloads,
associated
storage requirements are also reduced. This is done using
technologies like
virtual provisioning which is part of the VMware hypervisor.
Typically, savings of 30 percent are achieved on the storage
front,” said Seema Ambastha, Director-Technology, VMware
India.
With virtual server creation just a mouse click away, it increases
the chances of server sprawl resulting in wasting of resources like
storage and memory. Virtual machine sprawl can be avoided if an
organization defines strict controlled deployment policies for the
virtual environment, more disciplined provisioning of the
resources, optimization and feedback control in virtual environment
and controlled change management. In this case, this wasn’t a
challenge. “It was controlled with VMware’s suite of
management products like VCD, Lab Manager and Configuration Manager
(for provisioning), CapIQ (for optimization
and feedback) and ConfigControl (for change management),”
said Ambastha.
PVM witnessed significant results post deployment of
virtualization. It reduced
power and cooling costs by USD 128,772 per year. The net
server procurement costs were cut by USD 160,000. It achieved
a server consolidation ratio of 8:1 and increased hardware resource
utilization to 70 percent.
About Author
Ayushman Baruah is a Bangalore-based business and technology journalist with an insatiable appetite for news. He closely monitors and writes on emerging technologies such as cloud, mobility and social computing. Driven by his interest, he eagerly tracks the Indian IT-BPO sector keeping a close watch on the performance of the companies which thereby shape and shake market trends. During his career, he has covered tech events both at the national and international level and written several trend-setting news, features, and opinions.
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