Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Hosting—Hosting and application service providers
Customer Profile
Group NBT is a hosting provider with customers throughout Europe and the United States. Based in London, the company has 270 employees and is a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner.
Business Situation
A division of Group NBT wanted to simplify management of the 2,700 Windows®-based Web sites in its shared-hosting environment. It also sought to enhance service for its customers.
Solution
Group NBT is implementing Windows Server® 2008 R2 with Internet Information Services 7.5 in a Web server farm. It is running both PHP and Microsoft ASP.NET applications on Server Core installations.
Benefits
Improves availability
Eases management and enhances customer service
Cuts server hardware and energy costs
Provides more flexibility / “In the past, it could take hours to recover from a server failure. But by increasing resilience with IIS 7.5 in Windows Server 2008 R2, we expect at least 99.99 percent uptime.”
Dean Clark, Head of Hosting Services, Group NBT
The Easily division of Group NBT, which provides Internet-based services, wanted to reduce the time it spent on troubleshooting and routine support tasks. It also sought to increase the availability of Web sites in its shared-hosting environment. To meet these needs, Easily is implementing a Web server farm based on Windows Server® 2008 R2 with Internet Information Services 7.5. By delegating administration and using new diagnostic tools, the company can give customers more control and reduce its own management burden. Easily expects 99.99 percent uptime and can now offer more customers the opportunity to run both PHP and Microsoft® ASP.NET applications in a Windows® environment. Easily is also consolidating shared-hosting servers by more than 75 percent for an immediate savings of U.S.$55,000. The company expects more savings through reduced management overhead and energy consumption.
Situation
Based in London, Group NBT offers managed Web hosting solutions, domain name management, brand protection, and online mail and hosting services to customers in multiple industries, including private and government organizations. The Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner provides these services to thousands of customers. Group NBT has 270 employees and offices across Europe and the United States.
About 2,700 customers of its Easily business division use the company’s Windows®-based shared-hosting environment, which previously was managed on 15 stand-alone servers running the Windows Server® 2003 Standard Edition operating system. Easily wanted to enhance service for these customers by offering them more control and flexibility. Also, by doing so, it hoped to reduce its own labor-associated support costs.
For example, to maintain a highly secure environment, Easily did not allow customers to directly manage Web sites on shared servers. Customers instead used File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to upload code for Easily to implement, or they would open a support ticket to request Web site changes. Easily administrators handled approximately 400 support tickets each month.
Troubleshooting problems was time-consuming. Easily customers built their own Web sites or outsourced the task to other vendors, andit was therefore impossible to ensure that all the code was written correctly. As a result, it could take Easily administrators hours to determine whether an error message was the result of faulty programming or a problem with server configuration. “Sometimes it would turn out to be a problem with the code,” says Dean Clark, Head of Hosting Services at Group NBT. “But it was difficult to say that to customers and require them to spend hours working through it.”
Easily also believed that by improving system resilience it could reduce management overhead and improve performance. Although Easily achieved 99.9 percent uptime in its shared-hosting environment, it sought to increase availability with better throughput and fault tolerance. To share data in a server farm with a high-transaction workload, the company could either install a network-attached storage system or use a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path to retrieve content from a central file share. However, the file share method lacked sufficient scalability and performance, and Easily wanted to avoid purchasing additional storage products.
Finally, Easily wanted to offer customers more choices. Its current customer base has more Websites running PHP applications on Linux than Websites running Microsoft ASP.NET on Windows operating systems. However, a significant number of customers are using PHP with Windows, and Easily wanted to give more people the opportunity to run PHP applications while using Windows-based skills.
Solution
Group NBT became an early adopter of Windows Server 2008 and was interested in Web server enhancements in Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter. In March 2009, while visiting the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, the Easily team decided to evaluate the Server Core installation option of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5. With the Microsoft .NET Framework now available in the Server Core installation option, Easily administrators could host ASP.NET applications on Server Core with full use of cmdlets written using the Windows PowerShell™2.0 command-line shell and scripting language. They could also use the enhanced IIS Manager in IIS 7.5 to perform remote management tasks on Server Core installations.
Back in London, Easily stress-tested an IIS 7.5 Web server by running 100 PHP and ASP.NET Web sites on it simultaneously. The company was especially interested in integrated support for applications built on both the ASP.NET and Common Gateway Interface (CGI) frameworks. For example, the built-in FastCGI protocol improves the performance of applications that use the PHP scripting language. “We discovered that PHP runs very well on IIS 7.5,” says Clark, “and there have been improvements in the way ASP.NET handles memory, which helps us scale better and improve performance.”
Easily next tested deployment by using the IIS Web Deployment Tool to migrate the 100 sites to three servers set up with the Shared Configuration feature and Distributed File System Replication (DFSR). Easily uses a single, centrally stored configuration file to add new servers quickly for optimal load balancing. Also, DFSR will keep multiple storage systems synchronized and increase data availability. When a requested location is offline, DFSR redirects the request to another copy of the data.
Easily decided to use Server Core installations because they require only the components necessary for the server role. “It’s a smaller footprint, and consumes less memory and disk space,” says Clark. “Obviously the less memory and CPU we use, the more Web sites we can get on the same server computer.” As a result, Easily plans to consolidate the 15 front-end servers in its shared-hosting environment to 4 Dell M610 blade servers with Windows Server 2008 R2. The company estimates that it has room for 10,000 Web sites on the new platform, which will include the four Web servers and a storage area network (SAN).
Management was also a top priority, and Easily takes advantage of many of the features built into IIS 7.5. For example, the company can use Windows PowerShell scripts for routine management tasks such as migrating settings and modifying sites. In the past, Easily wrote custom scripts to preconfigure site settings. Now the company uses task-oriented cmdlets and the Windows PowerShell Snap-In for IIS.
In addition, Easily can delegate administration to customers with IIS Manager so that they can perform many tasks themselves, such as managing default documents. Besides giving customers more control over their Web sites with self-service capabilities, Easily administrators can use diagnostic features such as the new Configuration Logging feature in IIS 7.5 to audit configuration changes to both the Web servers and their applications. They can also now use Failed Request Tracing with both ASP.NET and PHP applications to create detailed rules to track and log errors.
The company will begin migrating all of the Web sites in its shared-hosting environment to the new Windows Server 2008 R2 server farm in August 2009 and expects to complete the project within weeks.
Benefits
Easily can implement a high-availability Web server farm by taking advantage of new features in Windows Server 2008 R2. New capabilities will also reduce the support burden, improve customer service, and help the company cut maintenance and energy costs.
Improves Availability
Implementing a shared-configuration server farm is one of the many advantages that Easily expects to gain with Windows Server 2008 R2. High availability has always been a priority for both Easily customers and administrators. The company’s customers will benefit because their mission-critical Web sites will be more accessible, and administrators can spend less of their valuable time on troubleshooting. Easily can deploy new servers to the shared-hosting environment quicker when workloads increase, and it can use shared storage with DFSR to further enhance availability.
Previously, restoring 1 terabyte of data from a file server using backup software could take several hours. Now, because data is stored on a SAN, recovery is quickly accomplished by building the operating system from an image, pointing it to the SAN volume, and adding it to the load balancers. “In the past, it could take hours to recover from a server failure. But by increasing resilience with IIS 7.5 in Windows Server 2008 R2, we expect at least 99.99 percent uptime,” says Clark.
He continues, “Now we can easily deploy a shared-configuration Web server farm with Windows Server 2008 R2 without having to buy more products. As a result, we can have high levels of both profitability and availability.”
Eases Management and EnhancesCustomer Service
According to Clark, server management is getting easier through simplified deployment and administration. “For example, by automating tasks with Windows PowerShell, we can completely change the way we provision sites and do a lot less work up-front to get them up and running.”
And because Easily can give customers more control over their own Web sites, it expects to halve the time it spends on management and make customers happier. “Previously, any time customers wanted to do anything other than upload their code through FTP, they had to make a support call,” says Clark. “Now that we can delegate administration tasks with Windows Server 2008 R2, we can give customers more control and we’re going to see quite a few benefits as well through saved labor hours.”
By using enhanced diagnostic features such as Configuration Logging, Easily can track changes that customers make to their settings and quickly resolve any problems. Also, customers can use Failed Request Tracing themselves to find and correct the source of error messages. “By using the diagnostic features available in IIS 7.5, customers are more likely to identify and fix problems themselves,” says Clark. “It cuts resolution time, and customers are less likely to call us for help.”
Daniel Cohen, Product Manager at Easily, adds, “As Internet applications become more sophisticated, so do the needs of our customers. By taking advantage of IIS 7.5 and its purpose-built, self-management utilities, we will not only address our customers’ current requirements, but we will also benefit from a scalable platform that we can use to innovate and deliver new customer-centric solutions as the industry changes and evolves.”
Cuts Server Hardware and Energy Costs
Easily is realizing immediate hardware savings of approximately U.S.$55,000 by consolidating from 15 to 4 servers, and it expects that consolidation to cut costs further by reducing power consumption. Moreover, Windows Server 2008 R2 features such as Core Parking—which tracks CPU load and suspends inactive CPU cores in multicore processors—will reduce consumption even more. “Consolidating servers with Windows Server 2008 R2 will help us cut a lot of management overhead and energy costs,” says Clark. “We expect to save $20,000 annually over the next three years.”
Provides More Flexibility
In addition to having more control over their Web sites, Easily customers will have broader opportunities to run both ASP.NET and PHP applications in a Windows environment. “For customers who have Windows-based skills, the ability to run PHP on Windows with high levels of performance is quite important,” says Clark. “Windows Server 2008 R2 is a very viable platform for PHP, and the FastCGI implementation increases performance nicely.”
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008 R2 is the latest version of the Windows Server operating system from Microsoft. With Windows Server 2008 R2, you can create solutions that are easier to plan, deploy, and manage than with previous versions of Windows Server. Building on the features, security, reliability, and performance provided by Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 extends connectivity and control to local and remote resources. This means that your organization can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies gained through enhanced management and control over resources across the enterprise
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