Case Studies
National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters Ltd (NAATI) - Application and Data centralisation and management
St Vincent de Paul’s (SVDP) - Simplified network security and remote maintenance
F1 Solutions - Flexibility, reliabiilty and increased capacity
F1 Solutions implemented a virtualisation strategy for application and data centralisation and management utilising fewer physical machines and building redundancy at all levels of the infrastructure (hardware, communications and software).
As their business needs developed, NAATI required a data centre that would:
- provide flexibility for growth e.g. to provide for the installation of SharePoint 2010 without the need to purchase additional hardware;
- centralise their environment and data while ensuring a highly available, fault tolerant and stable architecture;
- enable access by remote sites who remained dependent on the central data; and
- reduce costs by providing for internal hosting of the NAATI website.
To meet this requirement, F1 Solutions provided the following services:
- Upgraded servers to support virtualisation;
- Implemented a virtualised environment;
- Implemented Monitoring Tools; and
- Developed a Disaster Recovery plan that would enable efficient and complete recovery from a critical disaster such as the loss of a database, mail or application server or the data centre.
Virtualisation provided an economically viable disaster recover solution and the following benefits:
- Targeted utilisation of hardware resources;
- Application isolation i.e. Exchange and DNS are able run in their own operating system environment on the same hardware;
- Server consolidation i.e. fewer more powerful servers;
- The ability for State Offices to perform UAT of critical business applications; and
- Ease of migration to the new versions of system software i.e. upgrade to Windows 2008 and SQL 2005.
In addition, NAATI required:
- Improved ICT performance;
- A simplified ICT infrastructure; and
- Remote access for interstate offices.
F1 Solutions implemented terminal services to achieve the following benefits:
- Significant reduction in network complexity, improved response time, faster resolution time, higher availability, uniform security and simplified deployment of centralised data and network changes; and
- Implementation of a SOE for State Offices;
- Increased life of desktop PCs; and
- Simplified backup procedures.
For St. Vincent De Paul Society, with stores and centres located across Canberra and regional NSW, F1 Solutions implemented a virtualisation solution to provide cost savings, cost effective disaster recovery, and improved utilisation of hardware resources.
SVDP required simplified network security and maintenance for remote users and an in-house email server.
To meet these requirements, F1 Solutions provided the following services:
- Implemented Terminal and Email servers;
- Upgraded servers to support virtualisation;
- Implemented a virtualised environment;
- Implemented Monitoring Tools; and
- Developed a Disaster Recovery plan.
Virtualisation provided the following key benefits:
- Targeted utilisation of hardware resources i.e. favoured system (high priority system) can be allocated dedicated hardware resources and when not required can be used by other low priority virtual systems;
- Application isolation i.e. Mail and Web servers can run in their own operating system environment on the same hardware;
- Server consolidation i.e. fewer more powerful servers; and
- Ease of migration to the new versions of System software i.e. upgrade to Windows 2008 or SQL 2008.
Terminal Services enabled SVDP to realise the following benefits:
- Improved access speed to resources located on the server;
- Easier implementation of a SOE for remote users;
- Increased life of desktop PCs as most of the work is performed on the server; and
- Simplified backup as all user data is stored on the Head Office servers.
F1 Solutions implemented Microsoft Virtualisation to grow the business and increase efficiency, flexibility and security.
F1 Solutions has been developing customised desktop and web based applications and products such as TravelPack, iTravel and OmniStar at their Canberra premises for over fourteen years. Several years ago they expanded their business to incorporate a commercial IT infrastructure support team. Their clients include Australian Government Departments, Corporate organisations, and not-for-profit organizations, all with various and diverse technology platforms and requirements.
The Situation
The F1 Solutions Infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining servers and providing hardware and software resources for internal and external clients. Both internal and external clients require maximum up-time with high level performance and reliability. The F1 Solutions developers (internal clients) depend on the infrastructure team to provide reliable and efficient system support. The quality of the server setup impacts heavily on the efficiency of the development team and the quality of their client services. In addition, F1 Solutions host critical line of business applications for Government departments and is contracted to ensure maximum up-time, high level of performance and maximum reliability.
Zar Boman, the Infrastructure team manager, explains that they were facing two issues. “The first issue was the cost of maintaining and housing our existing servers. At the time we had over 65 servers at our Canberra premises. The server infrastructure design included hardware redundancy but failed to provide redundancy at the network and server level. The second issue was the limitations the current setup imposed on the business. It was unsustainable to continue to invest an initial $6000 to $15000 each time we required a new server environment for development or testing – and yet we needed more resources to support the growth of the business.” Solution
To enable F1 Solutions to grow its business and continue to provide the high quality of service it demands of itself, the company decided to invest in the most current technologies including Microsoft Hyper V R2 and the Microsoft System Center Suite.
“It was important that a high level of client services were maintained at all times,” Zar explained, “so we decided to implement virtualisation in two stages.” The aim of the first stage was to consolidate the existing servers and increase their disaster recovery capabilities through VMS and snapshot. This resulted in a mix of physical and virtual boxes. The major benefit provided at this stage was centralised management. There was a significant reduction in the overheads involved in maintaining, updating and trouble-shooting individual servers.
The second stage was to implement a clustered environment and decouple the storage and hardware resources (CPU and RAM). This addressed the remaining issues. It provided the flexibility to increase storage capacity as needed and to easily create virtual server environments for development and testing.
The solution utilises the following hardware and software:
- Dell R610 servers;
- EMC Clarion AX4-5i SAN;
- Cisco and Netgear switches;
- APC VA10000 UPS;
- Microsoft Hyper V R2; and
- Microsoft System Center suite of products for management of the virtualised environment.
This solution also meant that F1 Solutions had the flexibility to choose to re-use its existing servers for non-critical services and applications that benefit more from a physical server. We have calculated that this solution provided a four to one cost saving on procurement alone, while providing the increased capacity and flexibility F1 Solutions needed to continue to grow its business.
The Benefits
By implementing a virtualised environment F1 Solutions has experienced significant efficiency gains. Many of these are provided by Microsoft’s System Center which allows them to centrally manage and maintain all servers (they now have in excess of 120 servers) with less staff, and provide the required dynamic development environment. Its developers and testers can have access to a fully configurable and usable testing or development environment that identically mirrors the client’s production environment, within the hour. “In the space of four hours,” explains Zar “we had a terminal server for a client located in regional Australia up and running and ready for testing.”
Microsoft’s System Center also provides the tools required for performance tuning, application isolation, and for dynamically increasing storage or resources . Zar is enthusiastic about this feature, “We can dynamically increase the storage or resources by adding more hard-drive space or an additional server to the cluster without taking the system off-line or impacting the users.” In addition, F1 Solutions appreciates the benefits of increased security provided by the multiple firewalls and the automatic logging of access and usage.
The Infrastructure team and its clients are the clear winners. Not only can the team easily and quickly test the clients environment before deployment, it ensures patches and software, in their various configurations, are working before rolling them out to client sites. “This feature is only rivalled by the importance F1 Solutions places on reliability”, says Zar, “should two of the four hosts fail at the hardware level, F1 Solutions can continue to provide services to their clients. If the storage attached network (SAN) had multiple disk failures, we can continue to service our clients. If half of the networking equipment fails, we can still continue to provide services to our clients. I can sleep easy at night knowing this.”
The F1 Solutions server environment is:
- Highly flexible as it allows virtual development and test environments to be created as needed,
- Robust and secure as it utilises the full benefits of Microsoft Hyper-V R2 in a clustered environment, and
- Efficient as it has provided F1 Solutions with increased capacity to service their clients at a lower cost.