Customer Solution Case Study
Construction Firm Builds On-Demand IT Infrastructure with Private Cloud Computing
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Construction
Customer Profile
The Walsh Group is a large Chicago, Illinois–based construction firm that builds airports, highways, stadiums, bridges, and other large-scale projects. It regularly employs 5,000 engineers and tradespeople.
Business Situation
To keep up with steady growth, The Walsh Group needed its IT staff to increase the pace of server deployment. The firm also wanted to reduce server costs and improve application availability.
Solution
The IT staff switched from VMware to Microsoft server virtualization software to reduce costs and built a private cloud infrastructure that provides virtualized, on-demand server and desktop computers.
Benefits
- Better ability to meet business needs
- Reduced management costs by up to US$150,000 a year
- More efficient use of IT staff
- Improved application access
- Greater environmental sensitivity
Patrick Wirtz, Manager, Technology Innovation, The Walsh Group
Although The Walsh Group specializes in building big things, it wanted to shrink its data center. The Chicago, Illinois–based builder of highways, skyscrapers, and subways sought to reduce server costs and make IT more responsive to the business. To do both, the IT staff jettisoned VMware virtualization software and used the Hyper-V virtualization technology included in Windows Server 2008 R2 to virtualize not only servers but PCs. It is adding Microsoft System Center 2012 to create a private cloud computing structure that will enable it to deliver more reliable IT services on demand. With virtualized computer resources and automated efficiencies, Walsh reduces IT management costs by up to US$150,000 a year, frees its IT staff from repetitive work, and lowers hardware and energy costs by 20 percent. It can be greener with cloud computing and give employees easier access to applications.
Situation
The economic recession seems to have passed by The Walsh Group. The Chicago, Illinois–based general contracting, construction management, and design build firm has continued to enjoy design wins for airports, highways, bridges, stadiums, casinos, rapid-transit systems, and other large-scale projects over the past five years. With every new project and business expansion, however, comes the need for more IT servers to support that growth.
The server issue became critical in 2010 when Walshbuilt a new corporate headquarters that was to be a showcase for green construction techniques. In fact, management wanted the building to meet LEED Platinum certification, the most stringent level of environmental friendliness set forth by the U.S. Green Building Council, originators of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building rating system. To meet the Platinum power requirements, Walsh would need to seriously trim the number of power-grabbing servers in its corporate data center.
At the time, Walsh had about 100 physical servers in its Chicago data center. It also had 24 in regional offices and 200 at job sites (one per site), for a total of about 324 companywide. “We had already begun to investigate server virtualization as a way to deliver servers faster, make IT services more reliable, and reduce costs,” says Patrick Wirtz, Manager of Technology Innovation at The Walsh Group. “Management’s mandate to shoehorn the corporate data center into a smaller thermal footprint was just one more reason to accelerate our virtualization efforts.”
Several years earlier, the firm had deployed VMware virtualization software, but it had not made much headway in extending the software beyond its test and development environments because of costs. “While VMware had lots of features, we didn’t use most of them, and the firm’s licensing and support costs just kept rising,” Wirtz says.
Wirtz knew that expanded virtualization would help the IT staff meet the LEED Platinum certification and, more importantly, keep servers flowing to the business as quickly as it needed them. Deploying a physical server took a month or more, due to the need to order and provision physical hardware, and Wirtz didn’t want IT holding up new projects.
The firm could also use virtualization to reduce rising IT maintenance costs. Provisioning physical server and desktop computers and deploying and updating software consumed the vast majority of the IT staff’s time, leaving little time for new projects.
Thinking beyond virtualization, Wirtz had his eye on another technology trend that he knew could benefit Walsh even more: cloud computing. By configuring virtualized computing resources into utility-like services that could be configured as needed and delivered on demand, he knew that his staff could attain the “IT as a service” model that would best serve the business.
“Private cloud computing could help us make IT more responsive to the business, reduce our hardware and management costs, and make our IT services more reliable by eliminating single points of failure,” Wirtz says. “We just needed to find the right partner to make it happen.”
Solution
When Microsoft introduced the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V virtualization technology, Walsh decided to switch from VMware to Hyper-V as its hypervisor. The firm already ran Windows Server 2008 R2 on all but one of its servers (which ran the Linux operating system, as it was needed by a virtual private network solution), so the IT staff was very familiar with Windows server software. Also, because Hyper-V was included in Windows Server 2008 R2, the licensing costs were far lower than VMware’s.
“We also liked Microsoft System Center, which would make it easy to manage our physical and virtual environments from a single console, transition our VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V, and expand into cloud computing,” Wirtz says.
Expand Use of Virtualization
In March 2010, Walsh deployed Hyper-V on 10 host servers in its Chicago data center, 12 servers in its 18 regional offices, and one server at each of about 200 job sites. Walsh created about 150 virtual machines across the 10 data center host servers, with an average of 25 virtual machines running on each. It created 36 virtual machines on its 12 regional host servers.
By virtualizing its production computing environment with Hyper-V, Walsh was able to reduce its main data center servers from 100 to 50 and its regional-office server count from 24 to 12. The number of job-site servers remains the same, although each server can now host multiple virtual servers and fill roles locally—such as domain controller—that were previously housed in Chicago.
By using Hyper-V, Walsh was able to do something it was never able to do with VMware: run all its production workloads in a lean, cost-effective virtualized environment. All its applications, from line-of-business construction applications to custom financial reports, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft Lync Server 2010, corporate intranet, and others, run—and run well—on virtual machines.
The database servers for Exchange Server and SharePoint Server still run on stand-alone servers; however, by using Microsoft System Center, the IT staff can easily monitor servers spanning hybrid deployment models.
The Chicago data center servers run a combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with SP1. Regional office servers run Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with SP1, and job-site servers run Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with SP1.
Create Dynamic, Automated Cloud Environment
Virtualizing servers was just the first step for Walsh. Wirtz then began deploying Microsoft System Center 2012 and using it to construct a cohesive cloud computing “fabric” (structure) from its virtualized infrastructure. System Center 2012 is a multifaceted product that enables highly automated provisioning, monitoring, and management of private cloud environments through a single console.
A private cloud infrastructure is a collection of virtualized compute resources, together with pooled storage and network devices, that can be managed at a higher level of abstraction than stand-alone physical or virtual servers can. If Walsh wants to add more performance to an application or create a new server for a business group, IT staffers simply use a few mouse clicks in System Center 2012, which automatically executes the low-level process steps to deliver the necessary services or changes.
Walsh initially deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, the centralized management console of System Center 2012, which the IT staff used to provision the 150 virtual machines and move the VMware virtual machine workloads to Hyper-V virtual machines. Walsh is currently usinga prerelease version of Virtual Machine Manager to manage just its job-site servers but plans to manage its entire private cloud with Virtual Machine Manager when Microsoft releases the final version.
From a central console, the IT staff can use System Center 2012 to create one or dozens of virtual machines at once, add memory to virtual machines, load-balance workloads, restart failed servers, and handle myriad other server management chores.For example, creating new SharePoint collaboration sites for each new project was previously a manual process that consumed valuable IT time. The IT staff plans to use Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 to automate this process. They will have System Center monitor a database for new jobs, see when new job sites have been set up, and automatically create needed SharePoint sites for those jobs.
Walsh will use Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 to monitor its servers, both physical and virtual, and their application workloads. If an application slows, a processor overheats, or a virtual machine needs more memory, System Center can detect this and take the necessary action automatically or notify a staff member—before a server fails.
“System Center Operations Manager 2012 provides broad support for third-party products, so we’ll be able to get rid of a third-party product that we needed to monitor these products previously,” Wirtz says. “We’ll be able to get much better insight into the performance of our job-site servers. With System Center 2012, we’ll also be able to update servers and do capacity monitoring more easily. We can perform these tasks for all servers at once, from one console, rather than tending to each individual server.”
Walsh uses Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 to back up regional and headquarters servers and will upgrade to the System Center 2012 version of that product when it is available.
Walsh licenses its private cloud software using the Enrollment for Core Infrastructure (ECI) licensing program, which offers a cost-effective way to license Windows Server 2008 R2, System Center 2012, and Microsoft security software. ECI is a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement enrollment for customers who want to simplify licensing, reduce costs, and manage their core infrastructure more efficiently. “The ECI not only saves us money but time, because we don’t need to worry about how many licenses we need,” Wirtz says. “We have one license per job site, which gives us all the software we need.”
Extend Virtualization to Desktops
Server virtualization with Hyper-V has gone so well that Walsh is working on a pilot project to virtualize desktop computers, too. Instead of issuing a new employee an expensive, high-end PC and saddling the IT staff with an ongoing software maintenance burden, the IT staff can simply “clone” a standard desktop software image running on a server and give the employee access to it using any older and lessexpensive client device.
Walsh uses Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology to implement desktop virtualization. With VDI, each virtual desktop—consisting of an operating system, applications, and user data—runs in its own virtual machine within a server. Walsh plans to use the Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) software to package and stream the applications to the virtual desktops.
“When a new employee is hired, we can just kick off a System Center 2012 workflow to create the VDI image and accompanying virtual machine, configure the needed software, and manage the virtual desktop from our central System Center console,” Wirtz says. “The plan is to start with hourly technicians, such as payroll, accounting, and human resources people, who don’t need big powerful desktops and use computers only intermittently.”
Walsh is also testing virtual desktops at the other end of its desktop spectrum: engineering workstations. It is using Hyper-V, the Microsoft RemoteFX feature in Windows Server 2008 R2, and Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 to deliver graphics-intensive computer-aided design (CAD) applications to engineers. RemoteFX helps deliver rich graphics experiences with server-side graphics processing.
Benefits
By choosing Microsoft as its private cloud partner, The Walsh Group can more nimbly meet its needs for IT services, reduce costs, better utilize its IT staff, and improve customer service and application availability.
Better Ability to Meet Business Needs
Today, the IT staff can deploy a virtual machine within hours versus the month or more required previously to requisition and deploy physical servers. “We are no longer waiting to get a server from IBM; we can get a virtual machine up and running in a couple of hours,” Wirtz says. “New services such as SharePoint Server and Microsoft Lync Server just weren’t around a few years ago, but now people rely on them and consider them a critical part of their productivity tool set. With virtualization and cloud computing, we can deploy needed services as soon as a job site is up and running. This makes our employees more productive right away and helps us communicate seamlessly as a team.”
Wirtz’s staff can also get resources to internal application developers faster. Developers who need test and development servers can get virtual machines from IT—or even deploy their own using an online portal—immediately, rather than in days or weeks.
Management Costs Reduced by Up to $150,000 Annually
By using cloud computing, Walsh is also saving money. It has reduced its companywide server count from 324 to 262, a reduction of 20 percent. “However, management expects us to be continuously cutting capital costs,” saysTim Nottolli, Director of Information Technology at The Walsh Group. “What’s more important is saving staff time. Over the course of a year, we’llsave up to $150,000 in server and desktop deployment and maintenance tasks.”
For example, by using System Center 2012, Wirtz and his colleagues can save time moving between multiple consoles and piecing disparate data together to achieve a unified view of a problem. They can monitor and manage mixed deployment models (cloud and stand-alone server, public and private clouds) and mixed Windows–Linux environments with one console. Walsh plans to put some applications in the Windows Azure public cloud, and it could also manage them from its System Center 2012 console. It is still running one construction application on VMware and is able to manage those virtual machines through System Center.
“Because all the System Center components are one product now, they work together seamlessly and enable our staff to work so much more efficiently,” Wirtz says. “System Center gives us one ‘pane of glass’ through which we can see and manage everything in our environment.”
By virtualizing PCs and engineering workstations, Walsh could greatly reduce desktop computing costs. It could buy less powerful and less expensive client devices, reduce electrical costs, and update applications more easily.
“Engineering workstations cost about $5,000 apiece,” Wirtz says. ”Plus, these machines require more software maintenance work than normal business PCs, because the software is updated frequently. Running these workstations virtually in a private cloud would allow us to reduce this maintenance time from 10 hours per workstation to 10 hours for one virtual desktop—a time savings of roughly $20,000 a year [part of the $150,000 annual savings mentioned above]. A virtual desktop model would also help us be more nimble, share the hardware among many employees, troubleshoot problems more easily, and get projects into the hands of users more quickly.”
More Efficient Use of IT Staff
With greater efficiency, Walsh is able to use its IT staff more intelligently. “Our people can focus on things that only people can do, and we can let computers do what they’re good at,” Wirtz says. “When a help-desk ticket comes in, all our staff needs to do is hit ‘approve,’ and System Center takes care of the rest. I can empower my staff to create a SharePoint site by clicking a button rather than going through all the manual, mundane steps. No one wants to spend their day slogging through repetitive tasks.”
A more automated IT environment also delivers greater peace of mind and improved work-life balance. “Being able to kick off an IT process and later receive notice on my Windows Phone that it finished means that I can go home sooner and spend more time with my wife, playing with my dog, or going for a run,” Wirtz says.
Improved Application Access
With a cloud computing environment, Walsh can also give employees more reliable access to applications. A cloud-based infrastructure provides easy migration of workloads between virtual machines and host computers. If a workload needs more performance or a host server is in trouble, System Center automatically adds another virtual machine or moves the application to another host to prevent application slowdown or failure.