Bharat Petroleum Corporation's Infrastructure Virtualization

The Problem: In 2011-12, about 64 hardware servers and storage systems at BPCL's three data centers had reached end of life and had to be refreshed. These were running about 100+ standalone and virtual servers. There was an urgent requirement for replacing this obsolete hardware, and ensure that the new hardware could handle the newer applications with minimal TCO. The idea was to create a highly virtualized environment with no single point of failure, on-demand availability, usage metering and charge-back, and reclamation of unused capacity.

The Solution: BPCL implemented a hybrid virtual environment comprising of Hypervisors from Microsoft and VMware. These were complemented by Microsoft SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) and VMware vCenter to enable centralized management of physical and virtual IT infrastructure, increase server utilization, and enable dynamic resource optimization across multiple virtualization platforms. This was further complemented by vCenter ChargeBack for metering of vSphere VMs in addition to SRM for aligning to BPCL's DR objectives.

The Result: The mix of 100+ standalone and virtual servers were reduced to 7 physical servers. As a result, BPCL also ended up reducing some license costs for OS, and SQL DB instances. Plus, fewer servers meant 40% reduction data center operational costs, reduced server outages and higher service availability. The infrastructure caters to 7000+ BPCL users and 3 million customers who access BPCL's portals.