Essel Propack packages data centres on cloud

MUMBAI, INDIA: Essel Propack, a packaging company in India, has deployed VMware’s virtualization platform, to centralize its worldwide datacenters into a single center in Mumbai hosted by a service provider.

According to Zoeb Adenwala, CIO (Global) for Essel Propack, “We were looking to reduce costs by consolidating the hardware that was supporting a Microsoft environment, while centralizing management and implementing a dynamic, flexible infrastructure. When we looked at the x86 platforms available in the market, we found that VMware was the only vendor that had proven technology and a good track record in virtualization. We decided to go with VMware and went live within three months.”

Essel Propack manufactures laminated and plastic tubes used in the packaging of oral care and personal care products, pharmaceuticals, food, cosmetics and industrial products.

Essel Propack employs 2,000-plus employees located in 13 countries and runs 21 factories contributing to annual revenues of US$300 million. With the VMware Infrastructure 3 platform, as the press release claims, Essel Propack has been able to optimize its existing servers by increasing average CPU utilization from 25 to 30 percent up to 55 to 60 percent besides achieving server consolidation ratio of 4:1.

“By opting for a virtualization approach, the company has saved more than USD 40,000 in procurement costs as it no longer needed to purchase a significant number of new servers. It also cut datacenter costs by 40 percent, with savings from reduced management and maintenance costs, power, cooling and real estate.”

It has enabled Essel Propack to rapidly deploy and manage multiple virtual machines, whilst running them on fewer physical servers. Along with reduced hardware procurement costs, this has enabled the company to put in place an IT infrastructure that is optimized to meet fast-changing and rapidly growing business demands.

“VMware virtualization technology also helped the company to reduce server deployment time significantly from three weeks to three hours. It now takes ten minutes to restore a corrupted server, compared to six or seven hours prior to virtualizing. By deploying VMware Infrastructure at their central datacenter, Essel Propack was able to remove 18 of 27 physical servers and is now using five blade servers to run a virtualized infrastructure, comprising about 21 virtual machines, with a sixth blade server available for expansion.”

Ganesh Mahabala, regional director, VMware India & SAARC said, “Companies like Essel Propack are rapidly adopting virtualization because of the clear business benefits it provides around lowering the total cost of their IT infrastructure while enabling entirely new levels of business agility.”

The VMware deployment lays the foundation for Essel Propack’s long-term virtualization strategy designed to serve its users who require continuous on-demand access to mission-critical applications and information.

Essel Propack plans to use VMware solutions to underpin its upgraded disaster recovery architecture later in 2009.

The company worked closely with VMware partner, Avnet Technology Solutions, to prepare the initial design and subsequently the implementation.