Overview
Country or Region: South Africa
Industry: Hosting
Customer Profile
Dimension Data is a global IT solutions and services provider with customers in more than 50 countries. The South Africa–based company offers a variety of cloud and managed services.
Business Situation
Dimension Data had already virtualized its datacenters but wanted to offer customers more self-service capability. It also wanted to reduce capital and operating costs.
Solution
Dimension Data upgraded to Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to gain better virtual machine clustering and control and enhance its self-service portal capabilities.
Benefits
n Reduce help-desk calls by 30 percent
n Reduce storage costs by US$200,000
n Trim virtualization licensing costs
n Give customers more technology choice
n Generate new business opportunities / “Having Hyper-V in our datacenters gives a very high comfort level to our management, which likes to see a breadth of technology and more customer choice.”
Sunil Mathur, Virtualization Architect, Dimension Data
Dimension Data understands the importance of staying at the forefront of technology: the latest technology presents new service possibilities and helps it operate its datacenters more efficiently and cost-effectively. The global hosting services provider upgraded to the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 datacenter solutions to take advantage of enhancements in multitenant cloud computing. With these enhancements, Dimension Data expects to reduce help-desk calls by 30 percent, trim virtualization licensing costs, and reduce server and storage costs—the latter by US$200,000 over the next three to five years. Dimension Data can now give customers the choice to use lower-cost Hyper-V virtualization technology (versus VMware) for cloud services and can offer more revenue-boosting services.
Situation
Dimension Data is a US$5.84 billion IT solutions and services provider based in South Africa. Through its 15,000 employees, Dimension Data serves customers in more than 50 countries, including 78 percent of the Fortune 100 and 62 percent of the Fortune 500—a total of 6,000 organizations across all major industry verticals.
Dimension Data strives to keep its 15 global datacenters equipped with the latest technology so that it can give customers unparalleled choice and a range of competitive hosting services. It also wants to take advantage of technologies that can lower datacenter costs, both server and storage-related capital costs and datacenter management costs.
The Dimension Data Cloud Business Unit ran the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system on most of its servers and used VMware software to virtualize physical servers and reduce capital costs. In late 2012, Dimension Data upgraded three of its datacenters to the Windows Server 2012 operating system, which the IT staff felt represented a giant leap in maturity beyond Windows Server 2008 R2.
Dimension Data used Windows Server 2012 and VMware virtualization technology to create a line of hosted private cloud services; however, it still needed to run customer workloads on dedicated physical servers. It did not have multitenant capability—the ability to run multiple customer workloads on the same physical hardware—which would have reduced server costs by giving Dimension Data more flexibility in allocating datacenter resources.
Further, Dimension Data had created a self-service portal that customers used to order virtual machines online. However, customers were limited to basic choices—small, medium, or large virtual machines—and did not have the ability to customize or dynamically change their server, storage, or network resources. Dimension Data staff members also lacked the administrative tools that would let them monitor cloud resource usage so that they could better optimize the underlying physical server infrastructure.
Lastly, Dimension Data was interested in enhancing its cloud services with more flexible offerings and in offering customers more choices beyond VMware, which was expensive. “We wanted to create new hosting offerings with the automation and management benefits provided by the newer versions of Hyper-V technology and Microsoft System Center,” says Sunil Mathur, Virtualization Architect at Dimension Data. “We’re always under pressure to reduce costs, so we sought a more strategic partnership with Microsoft to develop a business case around creating a multitenant cloud offering based on Hyper-V.”
Solution
Dimension Data enrolled in the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to learn more about the enhancements in multitenant cloud computing. Dimension Data was specifically interested in evaluating guest operating system clustering, multitenant self-service portal enhancements, and enhanced virtual machine control and reporting. It worked with Microsoft Services Consulting to deploy Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter and System Center 2012 R2 in three lab environments where its engineers and developers could test them.
Guest Operating System Clustering, Inexpensive Storage Options
Windows Server 2012 R2 provides the ability to create a cluster of guest virtual machines and to further designate a virtual hard disk (VHDX) file as shared storage for the cluster. This capability lets Dimension Data give customers application-level high availability for workloads while maintaining the agility and density of a multitenant environment. Shared VHDX files can be stored either on a scale-out file server cluster or on cluster-shared volumes on block storage. Shared VHDX clustering preserves dynamic memory, live migration, and storage live migration for a virtual machine that is part of the guest cluster.
Dimension Data is also taking advantage of Storage Spaces, a feature set introduced in Windows Server 2012, which provides the ability to pool multiple physical hard disk drives and create highly resilient, reliable, and cost-effective storage arrays that replace expensive storage area networks (SANs).
Enhanced Self-Service Portal
During the RDP, Dimension Data also deployed and evaluated the Windows Azure Pack, a collection of technologies that hosting service providers can use to deploy services that are consistent with those in Windows Azure from their own datacenters. These technologies, built on top of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, include portals for both hosting administrators and customers and services for websites, virtual machines, networks, databases, and an enterprise service bus.
By augmenting its existing self-service portal with the portal in Windows Azure Pack, Dimension Data can offer customers much more flexibility in configuring virtual resources. “We can present a pool of resources to customers—say, 50 CPUs, 500 gigabytes of hard drive space, and three different network options—which they can configure as they wish,” Mathur says. “This gives them far more flexibility.”
Dimension Data needs to keep its existing portal because the company’s financial and billing systems are integrated with it. However, the company was able to easily connect its existing portal to the Windows Azure Pack portal to greatly expand its self-service capabilities.
Better Virtual Machine Control and Monitoring
By using Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, Dimension Data has, and can give customers, more control over cloud resources. System Center 2012 R2 includes a feature called Remote Console that provides access to the console of virtual machines through the host server when other remote tools are unavailable. This is useful if, for example, a virtual machine is offline or does not have a network connection.
Dimension Data uses the Virtual Machine Manager component of System Center 2012 R2 to deploy and manage virtual machines in a highly automated fashion, and it uses the Operations Manager component to monitor virtual machine health and performance. “A key improvement in Virtual Machine Manager is the improved linkage of compute, storage, network, load balancing, and other cloud elements, which provides a much smoother way to populate virtual machine templates,” Mathur says. “Operations Manager provides much better reporting. It pulls data about individual guest and host servers from Virtual Machine Manager so that we can see detailed information such as virtual machine resource consumption from a host server perspective. This is very valuable in load-balancing our cloud fabric.”
Benefits
By upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, Dimension Data will be able to reduce both capital and operating costs, give customers more technology choice, and offer new services that will generate additional revenue streams.
Reduce IT Costs
Dimension Data lists a diverse array of cost savings that will result from the upgrades. By offering customers the Remote Console feature, Dimension Data estimates that it will reduce help-desk calls by 30 percent. “We have more than 15,000 virtual machines running at any one time,” Mathur says. “We get a certain percentage of calls from customers whose virtual machines suddenly stop running because they lost an Internet connection or hit a wrong key. Our help-desk staff has to log on and reconfigure the customer’s IP address. With Remote Console, the customer can reconnect to their virtual machines without our help.”
By using Storage Spaces, Dimension Data has eliminated SANs in its labs, a savings of $200,000 over the next three to five years. With improved virtual machine clustering, the company has been able to reduce its management server investment from seven to two servers in each datacenter—a 60-server savings over 15 datacenters.
Over time, as some customers who are currently on VMware-based virtual machines switch to the Hyper-V-based cloud infrastructure, Dimension Data virtualization licensing costs will drop. “With Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, we have an unlimited number of virtual machines included in the standard licensing, which is not the case with VMware,” Mathur says.
Give Customers More Choice, Generate New Business Opportunities
By offering a Hyper-V hosted private cloud environment, Dimension Data adds diversity to its datacenters, gives customers more choice, and reduces its dependency on a single vendor. “Having Hyper-V in our datacenters gives a very high comfort level to our management, which likes to see a breadth of technology and more customer choice,” Mathur says.
What excites Dimension Data management even more is the new service and revenue possibilities that Windows Server 2012 R2 opens up. Mathur immediately cites two new service ideas: guest server clustering and the ability to resize running hard drives. “Customers who are running Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, SAP, web servers, and other applications will be very interested in such services,” Mathur says. “If a customer has 10 virtual machines with us and wants to cluster them, we will instantly double our business with that customer. Capabilities like these will help us grow our business.” Dimension Data will roll out its first Hyper-V hosted private cloud in early 2014.
“We look forward to having a much stronger relationship with Microsoft going forward,” Mathur says. “Its cloud vision is very much aligned with ours.”
Transform the datacenter
The hybrid cloud from Microsoft transforms the datacenter by extending existing investments in skills and technology with public cloud services and a common set of management tools. With an on-premises infrastructure connected to the Windows Azure platform, you can deliver services faster and scale up or down quickly to meet changing needs.
For more information about transforming the datacenter, go to:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx
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For more information about Dimension Data products and services, visit the website at:
www.dimensiondata.com