Corporate bellwethers turn to virtualization to slash cost
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 02 June 2009, 23:24 IST   |    2 Comments
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Corporate bellwethers turn to virtualization to slash cost
New Delhi: With firms relentlessly slashing their costs, the technology managers of companies in different domains are switching to virtualization. The firms in different domains ranging from Perfetti Van Melle, DTDC, IBM and Fullerton to Cricinfo.com opted for virtualization to cut costs and free up computers, servers, printers and manpower needed to maintain them. "In these times, no one will want to add more people just to manage their infrastructure. With virtualization, one can get a single view of all the resources," said Shailesh Agarwal, Country Manager, Business Systems, IBM India/South Asia. "Before implementing the virtualization solution, users in remote locations complained about slow response times as SAP screens took time to load," BK Chaturvedi, Senior Manager-IT, Perfetti Van Melle India told The Economic Times. The company's IT staff and engineers had to travel to different locations to address application access problems and other issues. Through the use of virtualization solutions, Citrix claims to extend a PC's life up to two years by allowing old PCs to run the applications on powerful data center servers. It also claims to reduce the cost of application management by up to 50 percent. Companies have also used the benefit of thin clients to reduce their costs. A thin client is a client computer or client software, which is dependant primarily on the central server for processing activities and conveys input and output between the user and remote server. DTDC deployment of 200 thin clients led to the total savings of about 80 percent in operating costs. A smooth switchover from MS Office to Star Office reduced the costs further. The benefit of virtualization, however, is not yet spread. As per a Gartner analysis, only 4-5 percent of servers in the world are virtualized today. The declining IT budgets and pressure on bottom lines may make IT environments globally to get virtualized.

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