TBZ Strikes Gold Post Consolidating IT Infrastructure With VMware

Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri (TBZ) has deployed VMware vSphere 4, a platform for data centre virtualisation, to help streamline their IT infrastructure, centralise their server architecture and reduce costs.

With VMware vSphere 4, TBZ is now running a consolidated virtual infrastructure from a single console, which will reduce the company’s hardware cost by Rs 40 lakh over the next three years while achieving a server consolidation ratio of 7:1. TBZ has been able to enhance its existing servers by boosting the average CPU utilisation from the current level of 3-4 percent to 70 percent and reduce server requirements to four hosts and minimised power and cooling costs. The solution has also helped improve their uptime from a mere 70 percent to 98 percent.

Kalpesh Dave, IT Manager-TBZ, said, “By deploying VMware virtualisation, we have consolidated our previously scattered servers into our primary data centre, which reduced our management load. The lower hardware requirement has also eased the strain on data centre facilities such as air conditioning. It has also enabled us to run on a single console and has reduced server requirement to four hosts.” He added that TBZ is now planning to employ VMware to virtualise 100-300 desktops this year to further reduce the IT management task.

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Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri – The Original (TBZ) is a retailer of quality jewellery throughout India. It operates from 15 locations across the country and employs 950 people. Prior to implementing virtualisation, TBZ was running 35 servers, about 20 of which resided in a primary data centre and the remainder were scattered throughout its Indian locations. This distributed architecture presented a sizeable management challenge to TBZ’s IT team, which had to ensure critical databases and applications met strict business requirements of availability and performance. The centrally-located servers were also starting to strain the data centre’s heating and cooling facilities.

In July 2009, VMware engaged their partner Network Techlab, who managed to streamline the whole operation in just two weeks. TBZ is now running key databases and applications such as Oracle Database 11g and Oracle E-Business Suite on 60 virtual machines on four host servers supported by networked storage. The VMware solution at work is VMware vSphere 4, featuring VMware ESX 4, High Availability (HA) and VMware vCenter Server.