Jyothy Laboratories' cloud infra cuts carbon footprint

Jyothy Laboratories has been in the business of manufacturing products in categories of home care and personal care since 1983. It has grown to a multi-brand and multi-product company operating across India.

The challenge

Jyothy Laboratories was running with a server count of 10 physical servers and over 15 Virtual Machines (VMs). The physical server configuration and management were constraining performance and efficiency levels. “Each server would require to be monitored at individual level. We needed a converged environment where monitoring and management tools are easily available,” says Ravi Razdan, Head-Systems and HR, Jyothy Laboratories.

The solution

The project, which required the company to consolidate its servers, was initiated in March 2015. “We designed and implemented the blade server along with Hyper V as a virtual platform and deployed the blade chassis. The VM per blade and resource allocation was designed to ensure that critical VMs had the provision to be moved to another host server in case of any blade-failure,” says Razdan. The team built their very own private cloud infrastructure to support this consolidation.

It is as crucial to optimize security management especially in case of virtual machines. “The base level system is hardened and so is the VM residing in it, apart from normal server antivirus/ antimalware,” he says.The servers were further protected with an all-inclusive unified threat management system.

The benefits

The benefits of server consolidation were many.  “With private cloud infra we now have capacity available to dynamically allocate resources to the virtual machine to meet peak demand in performance. There is therefore provision to add any new server on demand,” says Razdan.  

Whereas the cost control is concerned, the funds and resources behind managing 10 physical servers was cut down to handling a single and powerful chassis. Consolidating the servers also directly reflected on the intangible costs of power, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. The company also saved on the space required to  house the servers.

This implementation has offloaded the problem of server management for the IT team at Jyothy Laboratories. “Our focus still remains same as far as infrastructure availability is concerned. But with server consolidation behind us, the team now has some spare time available to explore new technology solutions to enhance our current IT setup,” says Razdan.