Value from Virtualization

ITW India Automotive preferred virtualizing desktops to buying full-fledged systems, thereby optimizing the IT infrastructure and cutting hardware costs by about 50%

By Heena Jhingan

Until last year, IT was a non-issue for ITW India Automotive, the Indian arm of Chicago, USA-based Illinois Tool Works that was set up in Pune in 2004. A year later, it set up another facility at Chennai. The company had to rethink its IT infrastructure design only last year, when it decided to expand its footprint to a new location, Manesar, in Haryana.

ITW India Automotive, which designs and manufactures engineered plastic injection molded components and fasteners for the automotive industry, realized that it needed to upgrade its obsolescent IT infrastructure. The existing infrastructure would be a roadblock in the company’s plans of implementing some key business applications like SAP and Tally.

A complete hardware refresh in terms of buying new desktop machines would result in huge expenses. Instead, the company decided to rely on virtualization technology that would help it optimize its IT infrastructure and save overheads on power bills as well. In order to streamline and centralize IT infrastructure management and reduce hardware acquisition and operational costs, the company deployed NComputing L230 computer access terminals on the vSpace servers from the vendor for all plant locations.

According to Prasad Bhattad, Manager – IT, ITW India Automotive Ltd, had they bought the modern machines with processors such as Intel dual core i5/i7, they would be investing in units with greater processing power than a typical user at their organization requires. “We felt that by doing so, both power and hardware resources would be wasted. We thus decided to find a solution that could help us use our IT and human resources to the optimum and is simple to deploy and manage,” he says.

At present the company has about 80 VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) units—45 at Pune, 25 at Chennai and 10 at the new facility at Manesar.

The decision to embrace virtualization came with a lot of skepticism, though. Bhattad explains: “When we were evaluating solutions, people discouraged us from going ahead with a VDI solution, saying that business applications wouldn’t run effectively on a virtual desktop platform. However, our experience has been good. We are using many business applications, such as SAP, Tally and Outlook, running well on NComputing’s virtual desktop platform. In Pune and Chennai, we mostly have 25-35 concurrent users accessing SAP on a daily basis, but we have never had any performance issues.”

At a time when some peers dissuaded them from investing in VDI, there were others who warned them of compatibility issues that could arise with some of the Linux-based solutions that were available in the market.

“This all the more built our faith in a solution like NComputing that would be OS-agnostic,” says Bhattad.

Cost and convenience
While there are some larger players in the VDI market like HP, Dell and IBM, ITW found NComputing to be the best fit to its needs and budget. Bhattad believes the deal has enabled them to bring value to business in the true sense.

“In comparison to the NComputing solution, which costs about Rs 5000-6000 per unit, the other solutions are priced around Rs 13,000 to 15,000 per unit and none of the vendors that we evaluated offered warranty; whereas with the NComputing solution we could avail of a three-year warranty,” avers Bhattad.

On the earlier infrastructure, the power consumption was to the tune of about 125 Watt per CPU, which dived down to 1-5Watt. “We are currently using about 80 VDI seats, and the saving on these is big: in less than a year of implementation of the NComputing solution, we have already begun recording power savings,” he says.

Bhattad also feels it is much simpler to scale on a virtual environment. “Every time we need to add a user, we can add a low-cost NComputing seat instead of buying a PC/laptop that would typically cost between Rs 30,000 and 35,000. So, there is an upfront hardware cost saving of up to 50%.”

Bhattad says there are other benefits that come in with this kind of an implementation. Since the company is managing the entire infrastructure and data at each location through a single console, data and application access rights are pre-defined for each user. This, he believes, not only lends enhanced security in a LAN-based infrastructure, but also helps them avoid the additional cost to store and administer the data.

“Earlier, two engineers were required at each location to maintain and support the infrastructure, but now only one engineer is doing the job with greater ease,” says Bhattad.

Integration ahead
In the last leg of deployment, 10 seats have been deployed at the Manesar facility. Going forward, ITW India Automotive plans to add more seats. At present, the company has three servers operating for its three locations. Bhattad informs there are plans underway to integrate these three servers on a single console, which will enable centralized monitoring and further ease management of the IT infrastructure across all locations.