How Virtualization Managed Weir’s Sprawling Growth

A virtualized environment has not only helped Weir India to save space and consolidate servers, but also stack growth

Weir, an FTSE 100 company founded in 1871 and headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, is a global provider of engineering solutions to the minerals, oil and gas, and power sectors. With a worldwide network of over 140 manufacturing facilities and service centers, the business has a presence in more than 70 countries. It claims an annual revenue of over £2.2 bn in 2011. When Weir Group, Scotland, started its India operations in 2003, it was faced with the challenge of managing multiple offices, a growing workforce, and a burgeoning number of applications. The company grew rapidly from 30 employees to 1,200 employees and expanded to other divisions-power and industrial division-with acquisition of BDK valves in Hubli. It also es- tablished another subsidiary company, EnSci in Bengaluru with an objective of providing engineering and IT services.

The Challenge

Weir's IT department had its hands full as it was responsible for providing and maintaining the backbone for all divisions and employees. At the outset, the company had 3-4 Dell servers supported by EMC CLARiiON storage, but the growth demanded many additional software applica- tions to operate productively. Each application had to be installed on a dedicated server due to software conflicts, incompatibility of the op- erating system, and other hardware requirements.

By 2006, Weir India housed more than 120 applications in its data center running on 9 servers.

The servers occupied significant floor space in the data center and it became a challenge to manage the server sprawl. The servers were also getting old and maintenance was expensive. Girish Gowda, head, IT infrastructure, Weir India explains, "Each application resided on its own dedicated server. There were 9 servers running more than 120 different applications. We wanted to consolidate the applications and servers." The data center was also rapidly running out of server resources to support development and testing requirements. "Some of the physical hardware was under-utilized, whereas some of them were overutilized. The software development team always wanted more machines to be provisioned for development and testing. There was an incessant demand

for additional storage, RAM and processor speed to meet requirements," Gowda reveals.

The Turning Point

Then in 2008, Weir India, adapted the virtualization technology. "Fortunately, as we were aware of virtualization,

we started experimenting with a free version of VMware server. We found that the solution was robust and useful, enabling centralized management and rapid application development through virtual machines. We soon wanted to virtualize our production environment," says Gowda.

Weir India chose Frontier Business Systems as the local partner for this project. It conducted a proof-of-concept, which spanned 30 days and tested applications, such as Domain Controller, DB2, SQL server, web server and in-house applications in the virtual environ- ment. Eventually, the proof-of-con- cept met with success.

The company used VMware's cloud computing virtualization operating system vSphere to provi- sion new machines and configure multiple applications that worked seamlessly with other software ap- plications and hardware devices.

Confident with the findings of the proof-of-concept, it moved ahead and virtualized over 90% of its workload. Most of the production applications resided on 148 virtual machines hosted on 12 Dell servers running vSphere 4.1. It virtualized business critical applications such as Domain Controller, McAfee Antivirus

software, Blackberry server, Web applications, ERP systems, Citrix applications, HRM, Tally and databases-Oracle11g, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL 2008.

Business Results and Benefits

Virtualizing these applications has not only enabled Weir India to optimize the performance, but has also ensured that the core applications are available 24/7. Their IT environment is easier to manage and maintenance costs have reduced.

The IT team no longer has to take the application servers off-line for maintenance, but simply move the environment to a different physical host while installing a patch or servicing the hardware. Earlier, data backup was done on tape, which has now eased up with the available snapshots and cloning features.

Gowda remarks, "Post implementation, Frontier provided us with detailed documentation on the configuration, customization, installation, and basic trouble shooting of the virtualized IT infrastructure. This helps any new team member get easily acquainted with the new deployment. Engineers who are not even a part of the team but involved in the project are able to manage the setup by referring to the documentation provided. It also helps address our issues making our life much simpler."

Though, it initially adopted virtualization to save space and consolidate servers, Weir India soon gained confidence and virtualized its critical applications as well. The virtualized environment has ensured guaranteed uptime for applications, no dependency on any operating system, optimal utilization of resources, load balancing based on performance and hardware resources required, and no performance crunches.

"Two evident benefits are business continuity and high availability. We are able to match demand of business in terms of provisioning the resources," says Gowda.