In 
Caf Coffee Day (CCD) is the retail division of Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Company Ltd. They grow coffee on their own estates spread across about 10,000 acres and have 1,300 outlets both in the country and overseas.
With the expansion in the business, the organisational overheads increased, resulting in increased challenges for the IT head. Some of the challenges that Rajesh Verma, Head-IT & Infrastructure, CCD, faced were around increasing cost of power, manageability issues and increasing IT manpower costs. An idea that Verma and his team had was to look at server virtualisation, which could address the challenges.
One of the main reasons, according to Verma, to opt for server virtualisation deployment was to optimise the performance of the existing servers with good capacity planning and also reduce the costs incurred on deploying additional servers.
The planning process
The first step that CCD initiated was to take up a PoC (Proof of Concept) and a feasibility study for two months on a live 3D environment to understand if the virtualisation technology met the organisational requirement and addressed the said challenges.
As part of the process, CCD initiated a vendor analysis programme to evaluate multiple vendors who offered the solutions, before settling for VMware, along with hypervisor software. The team worked out the costs and benefits structure and decided to allocate Rs 20 lakh for this project which is estimated to be completed by the end of this fiscal year.
As business expanded, the existing servers were unable to cope with increased data volumes, and the maintenance of the system put a strain on the IT team, which was why we decided to opt for server virtualisation, says Verma.
The solution
CCD has about 20 servers located across the country. As a strategy, Verma and his team decided that the implementation process needed to be done with zero downtime and hence took a conscious decision to do it over the weekends, which would save power and also expedite the process.
A team of three IT managers have been trained appropriately and assigned the task of monitoring and taking through the entire server virtualisation process. I plan to virtualise the 20 servers to reduce it to three physical servers through the virtualisation process. The 20 servers will be replaced with three physical servers, running 20 virtual servers in a high availability cluster configuration. An additional server is used as part of a backup system, further improving resilience and stability. Once the entire implementation is done, we expect the power cost to go down by 20-25 per cent, concludes Verma.
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