Bangalore: 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 datacenter.
A global producer of petrol and diesel, Essar Oil has recently turned its attention beyond urban markets to consumers in India’s heartland. However, there were increased demands on the datacenter 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 datacenter’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 Server2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology since it best addressed its business needs. Hyper-V is the Microsoft virtualization technology that enables organizations 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 virtualize its critical applications without spending money on new hardware.
“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. Overall, we are enhancing efficiency, flexibility and growth potential for the future.”
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.
