Many people view the car as a trusted mode of transportation, while some who live in jam-packed urban areas may even regard it as a luxury. We are mostly familiar with brands such as Volkswagen, BMW and Ford, but have you ever stopped to think beyond the brand name, down to the innards of the vehicle you’re sitting in?
Consider the braking system, the steering and suspension, air bags or even the seat belts. Chances are, a company known as TRW Automotive has played a hand in manufacturing some aspect of your vehicle. Headquartered in Michigan, US, TRW Automotive considers itself one of the top 10 global automotive suppliers, with sales in 2007 reaching US$14.7 billion.
The company, which operates 209 manufacturing plants in 27 countries worldwide, has some 65,000 employees on its payroll. TRW Automotive’s reaches extend to the Asia Pacific too, with 41 of its 209 plants located in seven countries across the region.
Growing pains
With operations spread across the globe, TRW Automotive encountered a problem of the IT nature that most, if not all, growing businesses face. That of sprawling data centres, and the escalating costs associated with power, cooling and floor rent. The company’s two data centres host a wide variety of applications central to its operations, namely the manufacturing, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial systems, in addition to a number of custom applications.
In mid-2007, the company decided to implement a project that would keep rising data centre costs in check. Hence, the decision to consolidate the server infrastructure at the two data centres, located in Livonia, Michigan, US and Cyberjaya in Malaysia.
“We initiated a green IT project that required us to reduce our server footprint and power costs associated with running these data centres,” says Chin Kar Wai, service delivery manager, TRW Global IS.
The company’s IT department decided to deploy virtualisation technology within its data centres, in order to meet its requirements, and VMware’s virtualisation products were selected for use within the data centres.
Today, the results of the virtualisation exercise have had a significant impact on the firm’s data centre environment. The deployment allowed for the elimination of more than 200 physical servers across both data centres. Currently, more than 240 virtual servers run on 18 physical servers out of which one is used for disaster recovery. “The result was impressive. We are saving between 70 and 80 per cent in power costs and about 50 per cent in cooling costs per annum in our Malaysian data centre alone,” says Chin.
“The exercise also enabled one IT staff member to manage up to 50 servers, which means more efficient management of the data centre and less stress on the IT department.”
More benefits
Deploying virutalisation technology within the data centre also enabled TRW Automotive to avoid expansion of data centre floor space. According to Chin, the firm’s data centres remain the same size, but more floor space has been freed up, resulting in lower cooling costs.
Other benefits from the virtualisation exercise include: hitting a server consolidation ratio of 20:1, upping central processing unit utilisation from 40 per cent to 50 per cent, reducing server deployment times from two weeks to one or two days and saving 80 per cent on the potential cost of adding more uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems across both data centres.
The company declined to reveal any dollar figures concerning the cost of deployment or the savings enjoyed, citing confidentiality. According to Chin, TRW Automotive’s server consolidation exercise is still going on. Terming the exercise a “continuous IT initiative globally”, he says: “Without virtualisation, we would have had to purchase more UPS systems, server racks and cooling units in our data centres.”
Apps on the machines
Applications running on TRW Automotive’s virtual machines include: Microsoft SQL Server 2005, IBM Cognos 8, Progress 9.1E, SAP NetWeaver 2004s, SAP ECC 6.0, MySQL MaxDB 7.6, Apache Web Server
