Rule no. 1: Copy everything – Every file, be it a document a database or a virtual machine. Saving everything is simple.

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Information Week has posted an interview with Revlon Senior VP and CIO David Giambruno – 5 Secrets To Revlon’s Virtualization Success.  The interview followed a panel hosted by Steven Herrod, CTO at VMWare.  No mention of where that take place but assume it’s at VMWare’s conference so could have a bit of positive spin around it.

But anyways, some great stats and one-liners of interest:

We make lipstick

Reminding everyone within IT that Revlon is not an IT company – keep ‘it’ simple.

Rule no. 1: Copy everything – Every file, be it a document a database or a virtual machine, is copied for disaster recovery purposes. Saving everything is simple

That’s also one way of tackling records management/information compliance.  The volume of data change is big – Revlom makes from 17 to 30 TBs of data changes to its virtualised environment per week!

“The data center phoned home to say, ‘I’m getting hot.'”

The disaster recovery plan was tested when a factory burned to the ground. Within 2 hours, replication was checked and data center workloads electronically moved. Users located at the factory (or rather, no longer since it had just burned down), were emailed a link to access a virtual desktop image at the new data center location and could resume work.

[Revlon] maintains an average virtual server to physical server ratio of 35:1.

As a result of virtualisation, Revlon reduced document printing from 750,000 pages a year to zero (wow!), reduced energy consumption by 72% and collapsed 21 ERP applications into one.