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Mumbai-based Polycab Wires has leveraged the power of virtualisation to cut down operational costs by as much as 25 per cent. The virtual environment has also helped the company in taking care of the back-up of end-user data and security. For Polycab, deploying virtualisation has been a win-win situation.
Polycab Wires ranks amongst India's leading cables and wires’ company. From modest beginnings over 40 years ago, Polycab today boasts of 19 manufacturing units and annual revenues of approximately a billion dollars. The company has warehouses spread across the country to enable easier and faster deliveries to its customers.
Replacing legacy infrastructure
Polycab was saddled with desktops that had reached their end-of-life. The company not only confronted the challenge of replacing aged desktops, but also wanted to go for a technology update.
“We had desktops that were five or six years old and were coming up for replacement,” said Udit Pahwa, CIO, Polycab Wires.
The company also wanted to save on downtime, which typically occurred in the traditional, non-virtualised environment.
“Despite having checks and balances in place, there were instances when we faced one or two outages on account of the hardware failing. Downtime directly impacts the company's top line, which is certainly not acceptable,” Pahwa explained.
To overcome these challenges, Polycab decided to go in for virtualisation. “While we were thinking of overcoming these bottlenecks, we were also looking at deriving other benefits that could be obtained through virtualisation – for example: cost savings, better manageability and improved employee productivity.”
Adopting virtualisation
When Polycab was deciding to implement virtualisation, the company carried out a business study, wherein it compared the replacement of the old desktops with physical as well as virtual infrastructure.
“We looked at the RoI over the next five years. The results were quite convincing to support desktop virtualisation,” said Pahwa.
Before making a purchase decision, he evaluated several desktop virtualisation solutions available in the market.
“We looked at both the technology aspect and the leadership of the technology. These were the starting points that went into making a purchase decision. Citrix is proven in the virtualisation space. They were in the space even when the cloud buzz was not there,” he recalled.
With Polycab finally deciding to implement Citrix XenDesktop, it got into a strategic tie up with Citrix's partner – Anunta Technology Management Services.
“We began rolling out the solution in August 2013, and completed an all-India roll out in November 2013. It took us three to four months to cover different locations across eight or nine cities,” Pahwa informed.
The deployment started with Polycab's head office in Mumbai, then moved to the manufacturing unit, and eventually to branch locations in other cities.
“Today we have close to 700 users using the Hosted Shared Desktop (HSD) environment,” said Pahwa. “Prior to adopting Citrix's virtualisation platform, we were operating on multiple Windows physical servers. Most of our applications, such as the ERP, are on Microsoft. As part of this move to the Citrix solution, we thought of using virtualisation on the application and infrastructure servers also. So, everything that uses our Exchange servers, internet portal, ERP was moved from physical server to virtual server environment,” he added.
Cost savings, better manageability
By deploying Citrix XenDesktop, Polycab was able to save on the downtime. “In the HSD environment, the back-up of end-user data and security are taken care of. This is critical from a business perspective. No matter how much you ask a user to take back-up of his data, he doesn't do it. However, when there is a hardware failure, there is a huge noise that is created in the organization. This challenge is more or less mitigated in the HSD environment,” said Pahwa.
Polycab has been able to ring in cost savings on account of end-point security, network, and power (thin client consumes 10 watt of power while a physical desktop consumes 200 watt of power).
“We were running 18 to 20 physical servers, whose numbers have come down to around five after the consolidation. So, power consumption, even at the data centre end, has come down,” Pahwa pointed out.
He is looking at a five year period while calculating the total cost of delivering the application. In his words, “The RoI (Return on Investment) that we were looking at entails saving 25 per cent of our operational cost year-on-year.” he said.
The IT department in Polycab can now meet the increasing demand of users by delivering apps and desktops as an on-demand service, provisioned in real-time rather than the hours of labour required to prepare traditional hardware.
Citrix XenDesktop has also improved the success rate of desktop image updates to nearly 100 per cent through centralised management and on demand delivery of standard images. It has also eliminated capital expenditures for seasonal workloads by deploying in the cloud, and reduced application management costs by as much as 90 per cent by streamlining application deployment and lifecycle management.
The road ahead
Polycab intends to further expand the virtualisation solution to its other locations.
“We are looking at all our satellite offices. While we have covered Delhi, Bengaluru and some regional offices, we are yet to reach all our branch offices (such as Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai). The next phase would see us covering all these locations. We will also take on mobile users as we have not yet covered users carrying laptops,” Pahwa disclosed.
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