Retail: Virtualization and Cloud

Future Group is a leading name in retail with famous brands like Pantaloon and Big Bazaar attached to it. The group employs 30,000 staff and operates in brand development, consumer finance, capital, insurance, leisure and entertainment, logistics, retail-real estate development and retail-media, and many more.

The retail major wanted to reduce its server stock numbering more than 100 physical servers from its data center, which was brought and set up around October 2008, and build a scalable architecture that would support the growing user numbers, new applications, and product development.

The Decision

Last year, Future Group partnered with VMware to deploy a virtualized infrastructure with VMware vSphere and VMware ESXi running on Sun servers. Like every organization, virtualization was their first step to cloud and they were finally aboard.

This helped the Group host multiple programs on the cloud like Point of Sale (PoS), customer loyalty program, gift voucher, floor planning, human resources systems, etc. It was about building differentiation from the competition. But what was different here was the ease of the entire movement on the cloud.

According to Parakh Dave, chief information officer and chief technical officer, Future Group, the company worked very differently from any other organization, where the IT initiatives were very closely aligned with the business needs. Hence the company did not take the generic approach while moving from physical to virtual to cloud, to keep a complete control over the process and avoid any technical and up-time challenge. The company opted for a hybrid model with both private and public clouds in play.

Benefits

A lot of problem fixation was done at the proof-of-concept stage with VMware server virtualization. Under this, the team first provisioned multiple virtual machines with a pair of physical servers running VMware vSphere. According to the company, this test was focused on evaluating the performance of the virtual infrastructure while delivering business-critical applications like point-of-sale and customer loyalty program.

The immediate results came largely in terms of performance and energy. The average server CPU utilization went up from 10% to 40%. And the power consumption came down by up to 25 kVA.

Also, intangible and long-term benefits were from the customer satisfaction, efficient workflow, and retail management.