Applied Materials has deployed virtualisation for various reasons such as increasing availability of solutions, consolidating servers and to reduce cycle time. Nagraj Bhat, Director, Global Information Services- India Delivery Center, Applied Materials, in an interview with CIOL discusses the virtualisation project implemented in his organisation.  

Excerpts.

CIOL: What was the business/operational objective behind virtualisation?

Nagraj Bhat: The objectives were to:
- To provide high availability solutions that deliver world-class server uptime
- To consolidate our server footprint so that we can reduce our data center power consumption and cooling requirements
- To enable IT to rapidly deploy new servers that meets the business demand of cycle time reduction for procurement to build of the development, testing, staging and production servers.

CIOL: What was the area of virtualisation?

NB: Web portals, SQL, Lotus Notes, FlexLm License Servers, Print Servers, Mid Tier Servers,  Development /Testing/QA environments, DMZ Front -end Apps, DRP Servers. Total of around 463 global virtual servers have been deployed to date. We are currently servicing approximately 80%   of all new server requests via virtualization. We have around 22 VM's in the Bangalore data center alone.

CIOL: What were the platforms/products used?

NB: VMWare ESX Clusters with Winodws XP, Windows 2003 Server (32 bit, 64 bit, Std edition, enterprise edition)
- Citrix XenApps to deliver virtualized Published Apps
- HP CAD Blade Workstation with Remote Graphics Software

CIOL: What were the benefits experienced from virtualisation?

NB: Virtualization maximizes server hardware potential, raising utilization from between 5-20% to 80%. In addition to reduction in energy costs, it improves procure to deploy cycle time especially for our software development groups.
 
CIOL: How do you address the security concerns that arise in a virtualised set up?

NB: Standard hardened OS image are created for each OS instance on the VMWare Platform as the same way as physical servers. Automated Patching, Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware updates through Microsoft SMS.
       
CIOL: Are you planning end-to end virtualisation (ie; server/storage - application - desktop)

NB: Yes. We are already leveraging multiple virualization technologies in the server, storage and application delivery. In the storage space, we moved from quite a few direct attached storage to SAN and NAS platform and planning to leverage the data de-duplication technologies. We are now running a pilot of the centrally installed CAD Blade Workstations in the datacenter with Remote Graphics Software so that we can access and work on graphics intensive applications over a standard laptop or a desktop to enable virtual workforce and real time collaboration along with sensitive data secured in the datacenter.