Essar Oil Optimises IT Environment With Microsoft Private Cloud

With a rapidly expanding global footprint, Essar Oil Limited has turned to Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and System Center technology to address its need for superior infrastructure that will reduce costs, increase efficiency and simplify management of the company’s datacentre.

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 datacentre at its Vadinar refinery in Gujarat. This datacentre 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 datacentre’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 since it best addressed its business needs. Hyper-V is the Microsoft virtualisation technology that enables organisations to make the best use of their server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines. The company has taken advantage of Hyper-V to virtualise its critical applications without spending money on new hardware.

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“Virtualising our server infrastructure was a critical component of our technology strategy,” said Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group. “With Hyper-V, we achieved better utilisation of hardware, leading to fewer physical servers, greater agility, reduced deployment and maintenance costs, and greater scalability. Overall, we are enhancing efficiency, flexibility and growth potential for the future.”

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 percent,” Prabhu said.

In addition, the virtualised hardware has reduced the company’s power and cooling energy consumption by 22 percent. Essar Oil also expects to cut operating expenses by almost USD 60,000 in 2012.

“We have added many benefits, from both an IT and business perspective, by deploying new server technology that consumes less power and lowers our power costs,” added Prabhu. “That’s a big win for our management.”

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.