A global producer of petrol and diesel, Essar Oil serves its customers through a network of more than 1,400 retail outlets countrywide. It has recently turned its attention beyond urban markets to consumers in India’s heartland. The pursuit of such growth, however, placed increased demands on the data center 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. The growing hardware requirements also placed greater demands on the data center’s cooling needs and power and space consumption.
The flexibility and efficiency of a private cloud environment seemed suited to Essar Oil’s requirements. Essar Oil has adopted the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology.
“Virtualizing our server infrastructure was a critical component of our technology strategy,” said Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group.“With Hyper-V, we achieved better utilization of hardware, leading to fewer physical servers, greater agility, reduced deployment and maintenance costs and greater scalability.”
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. Essar 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.“We have reduced our hardware costs by 69%,” said Prabhu.
In addition, the virtualized hardware has reduced the company’s power and cooling energy consumption by 22%. Essar Oil also expects to cut operating expenses by almost $60,000 in 2012.
Essar Oil’s IT administrators are also saving time and reducing overhead through the use of System Center, which helps automate many routine processes. The use of System Center allows the company to replicate its virtual environment seamlessly in the High Availability Architecture.
