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Milking the virtual cow at a Dairy

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CIOL Bureau
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PUNE, INDIA: About 400,000 litres of milk produced per day. Around 500 employees. And ten physical servers operating across two data centres.

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These were some figures associated with the renowned Chitale Dairy so far. About 50 per cent reduction in server hardware acquisition costs and 75 per cent in case of software.

Reduced storage costs by 25 per cent. Reduction of server deployment time from three weeks to three hours. About 50 per cent reduction in power, cooling and real estate with the elimination of a second data centre.

These are some new set of numbers after the Dairy consolidated from ten physical servers to three and tried out virtualization.

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“In 2005, we began evaluating ways of streamlining and enhancing our technology environment. We decided to implement VMware server virtualization for the required availability and disaster-recovery capabilities. In June 2007 we consolidated our environment to three physical servers operating in one data center. They host 20 virtual servers running multiple production applications and operating systems.”

Says an experience-sharing narration by Vishvas Chitale, director, Chitale Dairy, that is now evaluating VMware Desktop infrastructure for deployment next.

Earlier, the Dairy found it expensive and hard to source qualified IT support staff for its vast operations spread across ten servers and two data centers, with a significant risk to operations as another concern area.

But it seems that virtualization has proved to be a productive cow for this Dairy that finds the new environment scalable enough to support another 20 virtual servers on existing hardware that it feels would service its growth of 15 per cent YoY expansion into new lines of business.