Essay Oil deploys Microsoft private cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: Essar Oil Limited has turned to Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and System Center technology to address its need to increase efficiency and simplify management of its data centre.

A producer of petrol and diesel, Essar Oil serves its customers through a network of more than 1,400 retail outlets countrywide.

Samantha Parch, CTO, Essay Group, said: “The company had recently turned its attention beyond urban markets to consumers in India’s heartland. The pursuit of such growth, however, placed increased demands on the datacenter at its Vadinar refinery in Gujarat. This data center featured 60 rack servers running in a mixed environment, in addition to existing underlying servers that had grown old and were difficult and expensive to manage."

Hyper-V is the Microsoft virtualization technology helps consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines.

“Vitalizing our server infrastructure was a critical component of our technology strategy,” said Parch. “With Hyper-V, we achieved better utilization of hardware, leading to fewer physical servers, greater agility, reduced deployment and maintenance costs, and greater scalability. Overall, we are enhancing efficiency, flexibility and growth potential for the future.”

The deployment of the Hyper-V environment began in August 2011 and was successfully completed in just a matter of weeks by October of that same year.

Essay Oil has since consolidated its server environment to five physical servers and one enclosure running Hyper-V, operating a total of 25 virtual servers, enabling the company to add more server functionality without incurring the costs of new servers.

Moreover, the virtualized hardware has reduced the company’s power and cooling energy consumption by 22 percent. Essay Oil also expects to cut operating expenses by almost USD 60,000 in 2012, claims the company in a release.

“We have reduced our hardware costs by 69 per cent.We have added many benefits, from both an IT and business perspective, by deploying new server technology that consumes less power and lowers our power costs,” added Parch.“That’s a big win for our management.”