Case Study

Virtualization brings cost benefits to TBZ

By consolidating and virtutalizing 30 servers to four blade servers, TBZ is expected to save Rs 40 lakhs annually in its operational costs over three years. Additionally faster provisioning, no new hardware purchases and energy saving are additional riders By N Geetha

Mumbai-based jewellery retailer, Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri (TBZ) has always kept pace with changing trends in IT technology. As a testimonial to this, the jewellery retailer has gone in for a server virtualization project in an effort to reduce management load, increase server utilization and reduce its IT overheads costs. Being very futuristic in its approach in view of technology adoption, TBZ's IT Head, Kalpesh Dave has plans to rope in VDI solutions, once the server virtualization project is through to further squeeze IT costs. Additionally going by the need for virtualization solutions, Dave has been proactive in roping in server virtualization solutions with elaborate implementation process when the big players in the industry have been lackadaisical about taking advantage of the virtualization tools.

Need for virtualization

Running 35 physical servers, about 20 of which resided at its primary data center while others being scattered throughout its branches, resulted in posing a great challenge of increasing the IT cost and overheads for TBZ.

According to Dave the distributed server architecture did throw up a huge challenge of cost as there was an absolute need for him and his team to ensure critical databases and applications met strict business requirements of availability and performance of applications. Additionally, the centrally located servers too contributed to their part of impediments in increasing power cost and also adversely impacted data centre's cooling facilities. “There was a sheer need to reduce DC operational cost and bring in a single point of control,” pointed Dave.

Investment has not been a constraint for TBZ and it believed in having a full-fledged IT infrastructure for in-house developed ERP. The applications were deployed in silos spread across 3 tier applications including client-server application which needed integration and consolidation. During 2009, Dave decided to consolidate and virtualize their servers.

“IT took us four months to decide upon the vendor and solutions that we would deploy to consolidate physical servers,” said Dave.

In July 2009, TBZ zeroed in on VMware virtualization solution after careful evaluation of other vendors. Having finalized on VMware vSphere 4.0, Dave went ahead to rope in VMware's implementation partner, Network Techlab.

According to Dave, the entire process of implementation spread over two weeks as the solution enabled management of a consolidated virtual infrastructure from a single console, reduced server footprint to four hosts and minimized power and cooling costs. The total investment that went into the deployment was around Rs 45 lakhs. In all about 35 servers were virtualized to 5 physical servers.

The features that were lucrative for saving as Dave pointed included VMware ESX4, high availability and VMware vCenter server. The server virtualization solution was deployed on Dell blade servers. "I have deployed four blade servers from Dell so that my IT infrastructure can scale without a hitch when our business grows over the next five years. This infrastructure is carefully planned so that it can scale to 500 branches in future from the current base of 50 branches," he added.

TBZ invests about Rs 1.5 crores on IT tools and technologies per year and as a result of server virtualization and vSphere 4.0, the company has witnessed great benefits.

Additionally, TBZ is now running its key databases and applications such as Oracle Database 11g and Oracle E-business Suite on 60 virtual machines on four Dell blade servers supported by networked storage. According to Dave, the virtualized environment is managed from a single console remotely, eliminating the need to manage applications, databases and operating systems hosted individually on several physical servers. The retailer has experienced the benefits of virtualization and witnessed a reasonable cost reduction.

Paybacks

Interestingly, Dave has not observed any hindrances during the implementation process though there were certain apprehensions earlier with regard to security. "It was rather surprising to find there was no business disruption at any point of time when the servers were moved and virtualized," reiterated Dave.

According to him the new infrastructure consolidated to the production data center has enabled TBZ to reduce the number of people required to manage it. “By deploying VMware virtualization solution, we have consolidated our previously scattered servers into our primary data center, which reduced our server management load,” explained Dave and added, “The fewer server footprint [just four blade servers] means a cut on future hardware spending and would reduce our data center air-conditioning and power costs-resulting in a saving of Rs 40 lakhs over the next three years.”

With regards to the return on investment on deploying virtualization solutions, TBZ has accrued certain tangible benefits. According to Dave, a 7:1 server consolidation ratio has been achieved. The number of administrators required to run the environment is down to just one from ten people and improved server performance by 30 to 34%.

There have been certain hardware saving benefits, which directly impacted the spending. For instance, time required to provision a new server (excluding hardware procurement processes) is reduced from one day to just 20 minutes, boosted processor utilization dismal 4% to 70% , while there has been a drop in required rack space by 16 rack units besides improving uptime from 70% to 98%.

Next is VDI

TBZ estimates a 25-30% jump in its IT budget in 2010 as the company plans to do some major upgrades as a result of its expansion plans for its retail outlets.

Dave's next big agenda is to virtualize about 100 out of 300 desktops in 2010 to derive costs benefits. “We plan to go in for VDI solutions during the second quarter and evaluating various vendors including VMware,” said Dave. His team is also studying and evaluating the cloud services delivery model around virtualization, which would bring additional benefits to the company.

geetha.nandikotkur@expressindia.com