Virtualization helps Indian company cut IT costs

By SMBWorld Asia Editors | Jan 26, 2012

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Uttam Energy Tech, a design and manufacturing company in India, has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to build its virtualized infrastructure for both servers and desktops.

Uttam Energy Tech is utilizing both the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 platform as well as the Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 Beta, with plans to migrate all of its systems to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 upon general availability.

An Uttam Group company, Uttam Energy Tech’s state-of-the-art technology and continuous focus on quality have helped the company develop the world’s leading boilers for a variety of industries.

Uttam Energy Tech strives to create state-of-the-art engineering, drawing designs of its product, while at the same time, protecting these designs from misuse or theft.

“It was critical for us to restrict access to the centralized file server where our custom-made designs are kept, preventing our designers from copying and storing design files locally,” said Balram Adlakha, vice president, business development at Uttam Energy Tech. “In addition, we wanted to build an IT infrastructure that is secure, easier to manage with minimal administrative overhead, scalable to accommodate rapid growth and also cost-effective.”

With security, maintainability, scalability, performance and cost in mind, Uttam Energy Tech’s IT team began evaluating various products in the virtualization space to help resolve its challenges. Red Hat’s partner Taashee Linux Services, a Linux and open source technology solution provider based in India, managed the implementation.

The company evaluated the latest product offerings from VMware, but the costs for a combined solution of desktop and server virtualization became prohibitive, leaving Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the clear option for the firm. “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization just made sense, as it provides a combined solution for virtualized desktops and servers, and is 70 percent less expensive than competitors’ desktop virtualization products,” said Adlakha.

Taashee Linux Services assisted Uttam Energy Tech in developing template-based provisioning of Windows and Linux virtual machines to ease the task of provisioning new servers. With drag-and-drop features, virtual machines could be migrated live, from one physical host to another, in a matter of minutes as opposed to weeks in the physical environment.

"Without additional investment, Uttam Energy Tech will get a proven fault-tolerant system capable of easily migrating virtual machines when hardware or system failures occur on the clustered physical servers,” said Abhishek Datt, CTO, Taashee Linux Services Ltd. “The hardware-assisted virtualization offered by Red Hat delivered enterprise-class performance and reliability resulting in a smooth shift to a virtual environment.”

Uttam Energy Tech realized several performance benefits with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 and more recently ran a proof of concept with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta to examine the forthcoming features of the new platform. The organization was highly impressed by the platform’s virtual desktop features, the SPICE remote-rendering protocol and the ability to run and manage both server and desktop virtual machines from the same management interface.

“These virtualized desktops are running on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, which runs on our Dell servers,” said Adlakha. “So far, our work with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta has illustrated incredible stability and robustness to handle the system load. To date, we have experienced near zero downtime of the systems, significantly improving our productivity.”

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization also provided Uttam Energy Tech with lower IT costs, simplified management, reduced systems maintenance and increased scalability and performance. “The business impact of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is huge,” said Adlakha. “We’ve seen great results with the 3.0 Beta implementation and intend to upgrade all of our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization machines to 3.0 upon general availability.”

With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Uttam Energy Tech was also able to implement a secured and controlled environment for its designers to work, and the solution has provided almost native performance for its designers. “This secured environment has been especially critical for
CAD/CAM workloads, as the graphical applications require very high bandwidth,” said Adlakha.

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has also proven to be cost-effective for Uttam Energy Tech. “Including our thin-client setup, we are cutting our hardware costs alone by more than 50 percent,” said Adlakha. The firm also saved greatly on maintenance and administration costs as the environment is now more secure from virus attacks, significantly reducing the need for time-consuming rebuilds of its desktops.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provided Uttam Energy Tech with a secure and stable virtualization solution at an affordable price with exceptional performance. “Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and the SPICE remote-rendering protocol did not just reduce our operational costs, but more importantly, has made our infrastructure more secure, stable and high-performing, helping us to build a solid infrastructure platform for the future,” said Adlakha.