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Consolidation at Chitale

Chitale Dairy used VMware Infrastructure to consolidate two separate datacenters into one. Renuka Vembu reports

Chitale Dairy, a company engaging in the production of food and beverages, used VMware’s data center virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure, to consolidate its two widely separated data centers into one, leading to a significant improvement in application availability and reliability. 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 infrastructure

Vishvas Chitale, Director, Chitale Dairy, said, “We have a 1 GB backbone with Cisco switches with around 4 km of fiber optic cable laid down. We were using control net as well as industrial Ethernet connection to all inputs/outputs in the factory. The data from pressure, temperature, input/output condition, vibration sensors, and energy transmitters which are hooked to this network were available for process traceability, energy audit and process cost calculation.”

The hiccups

The processing of milk needs to take place within a short span of two to four hours, after which the milk curdles unless it is treated and preserved. Once this happens, it is deemed unfit for consumption. From this arose the need 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 on board. Even if one of its servers went down, the IT team had 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. It also had diverse storage from RAID 0 to RAID 5 on various servers, so maintaining inventory and data management was a Herculean task.

The company faced operational challenges with 10 physical servers spread across two datacenters in a town 500 kilometers from the nearest city. In this remote location, it also found it expensive and challenging to source and retain qualified IT support staff while also grappling with server sprawl.

Adopting a solution

Vishvas Chitale said, “Three years back, I came across VMware through a German Linux geek at one of the trade shows. He was running Linux on an IBM laptop and running Windows on it with the aid of VMware. I was curious and tested various such solutions available in the market. As VMware is a leader in this space and able to do storage as well as system virtualization with high availability with disaster recovery, we opted for the same.”

In 2005, the company began evaluating ways of streamlining and enhancing its technology environment. It decided to implement VMware server virtualization to provide the required availability and disaster-recovery capabilities. 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 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.

The working

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.

With this new application, users are granted access to various functions based on their profile. They do not need to leave the application as everything an employee needs, such as Word and Excel will be available through the Web browser. This homegrown ERP now has more than 9,000 forms.

Benefits

With this deployment, Chitale Dairy has reduced hardware acquisition costs, its expenditure on real estate, etc. 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.

Vishvas Chitale said, “Chitale Dairy is a thought leader with a hands-on approach towards new technologies like virtualization to enhance business processes. VMware virtualization solutions have helped us streamline and enhance our technology environment, helping improve system reliability and high availability while constraining server sprawl. By consolidating to a single data center, we have slashed in half power, cooling and real estate footprint, reducing costs and the organization’s impact on the environment.”

Chitale Dairy reduced server hardware acquisition cost by 50%, software acquisition cost by 75%, and cut power consumption in half. Deploying VMware 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. They faced a lack of skilled IT resources to support two data centers located in regional India. However, deploying VMware has enabled the business to consolidate to a single data center and administer its virtual server environment from a centralized location.

Latest developments

The company is now looking for a more robust disaster recovery plan with incremental file level replication in two geographical separated datacenter locations, consolidating all application in one High Availability (HA) cluster. With the new ESX 3.5, they can do dynamic resource allocation. Chitale Dairy is also evaluating VMware Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for deployment.

renuka.vembu@expressindia.com