Virtualization is being adopted by many organizations to reduce the costs of IT infrastructure and for optimum usage of servers' Essel Propack Ltd, part of the Essel Group, has used it to good effect The company is the largest specialty packaging manufacturer for laminated and seamless or extruded plastic tubes, and medical devices. The primary requirement for the company's Mumbai team is to have a centralized mailing solution along with a common directory and address book for efficient messaging solutions. Alongwith that they also need SharePoint Server, OCS Server, Symantee Mail archiving servers, etc which would require 22 physical blade servers. But using virtualization the hardware requirement reduced to only 5 blade servers and along with it the IT infrastructure management costs reduced as well.

Some of the issues before deployment were: whether the software vendors will provide support if a software was deployed in a virtualized environment, how easy will be the management as compared to physical servers?, will there be any difference in performance?, ete. In addition, Essel Propack faced the dilemma of not being able to buy hardware components as they could not bill their subsidiaries (at foreign locationsl directly due to transfer pricing problems So they wanted the complete solution to be provided as 'Solution as a Service'.

Their implementation partner deployed the complete solution and then charged Essel Propack on a per use basis. The company directly benefited from the solution in the form of reduction in capital expenses, annual expenses reduced by 30% due to low cost data center hosting, less rack space, reduced power consumption and reduced cost of manpower for administration.