Three years ago the IT shop at James Hardie Building Products had not yet hit the wall, but it could see the wall ahead in terms of space and power requirements to support steady business growth.  So, said Steve Killan, enterprise server manager for the U.S.-based manufacturer of fiber cement siding and backerboard and other building products, they took advantage of an upgrade to 64-bit Intel to virtualize their Windows/Oracle/SAP environment on VMware.

“We are about 99% virtualized today,” Killian told SiliconAngle Founder and CEO John Furrier and Wikibon.org Co-Founder and Chief Analyst David Vellante in the Cube at SAP Sapphire 2012 (see all live coverage and highlights at SiliconAngle.TV).

Many Oracle customers hesitate to virtualize their large databases in part because Oracle objects to the use of third-party hypervisors. “Oracle wasn’t very happy with us three years ago,” Killan admits. “But we never had any problems. They never actually ask anyone to reproduce problems on a physical machine. Fortunately we haven’t had to call them very often.”

In fact, Killan describes the virtualization process as very smooth and beneficial all around. And it did solve the company’s resource issue and support further growth both in the United States and in the Philippines, Australia, and Europe.

At about the same time that the company started virtualizing, it also moved to Avamar backup in a rip-and-replace to get away from tape and agent-based backups. The company has a half-Tbyte of data that it replicates between its main office in Irvine, California, and secondary office in Chicago. Although the official RTO is 30 minutes, “we normally have only a half-second delay between the sites,” he says.

He says he is at Sapphire to gain an understanding on where SAP is going to provide guidance to the company dev team. He described the keynote demonstration of SAP analytics as impressive. “My concern is what it takes to get there. If someone could do that for us in a month I would sign up, but I get the feeling that this is a millions-of-dollars and six-months-of-development sort of project.”