Applied Materials: reducing cycle time with virtualisation

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.