4-page Case Study - Posted 5/10/2007
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Hosted Services Provider Delivers More Competitive Services with New Platform
Fasthosts, based in the United Kingdom, is a hosted services provider with more than 1 million customers using its domain, e-mail, Web, and broadband services. The company has won many industry awards for consistently high-value, low-cost services. The company’s strategy is to automate all aspects of its business to lower overheads and pass these savings on to customers. In 2005, Fasthosts decided to offer dedicated servers for both Linux and Windows® customers. It investigated a system based on Linux, but ultimately decided to base its provisioning and deployment system on Windows Server® 2003. Implementing a Windows Server 2003 environment ensures that the entire dedicated server transaction—from customer sign on to provisioning and deployment of servers—is delivered quickly, with minimum intervention from employees.
Situation
The demand for hosted services is growing quickly, and Fasthosts, based in the United Kingdom, is at the forefront of this rapid growth industry. Fasthosts delivers domain, e-mail, and Web services and unlimited broadband to small and medium-sized businesses. The company has won many industry awards for its innovative and customer-centric technology services.
In 2005, Fasthosts saw a gap in the market for the provision of dedicated servers. The company wanted to provide an easily accessible, secure, and financially viable server hosting platform that would accommodate both Windows® and Linux server platforms and operating systems. Mark Jeffries, Chief Technical Officer, Fasthosts, says: “Although more than 60 per cent of our customers use Windows environments, we also need to provide choice and efficiency for our Linux customers.”
At the time, no other provider was offering customers a fully automated dedicated server platform, so Fasthosts wanted to offer a rapid service to its targeted market. Because the company’s entire business is fully automated—from the moment a customer signs up online to the provision and management of a Web domain—all aspects of its dedicated server offering needed to be fully automated, without compromising stability or security. The deployment of large volumes of servers had to be swift and simple and require minimal upkeep and maintenance.
Solution
Fasthosts considered a Linux platform for delivering its dedicated servers, but found it lacked the speed and flexibility needed to create a competitive offering. Jeffries chose to support the Fasthosts infrastructure on Windows Server® 2003 because it provided a stable and secure framework from which to deploy both Microsoft and Linux servers and operating systems. “With Windows Server 2003, we can coordinate building both types of server environments quickly and reliably,” he says.
The Fasthosts IT team created an automated provisioning system that manages every aspect of the dedicated server system using Automated Deployment Services (ADS), Active Directory®, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0.
ADS is a feature of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and provides support for mass server administration, helping Fasthosts to administer thousands of dedicated servers automatically. Active Directory manages user authentication and group security policies for all Fasthosts services, including its dedicated servers.
A SQL Server 2005 database underpins all of the company’s hosting services, managing customer, billing, and service data securely. Internet Information Services version 6.0 connects the entire dedicated server system, coordinating data from customer sign on to the provisioning and configuring of Windows or Linux servers and operating systems.
Benefits
The entire dedicated server system is automated and requires minimal intervention from employees. The system is extremely reliable and helped Fasthosts to expand business while maintaining the current size of its IT team.
Automated Provisioning Lowers Overheads
Minimal employee intervention is needed with the automated provisioning system because all services—from customer sign on to allocating servers—are handled through IIS 6.0 and ADS.
Fasthosts has 100 employees, including administrative and accounts people. Yet only four people are now needed to manage thousands of servers. Jeffries says: “Without automated deployment, we could not have expanded our dedicated services or increased business to the volume we have, while still retaining the size of the team and operation.”
By keeping staffing levels low and handling routine security and maintenance automatically, savings are passed on to customers who benefit with cheaper rental and enhanced security protection.
Customers Connected in Just 15 Minutes
As soon as a customer buys a server online, ADS can configure the correct server and network. If a customer chooses a Linux server platform, a Linux PXE server is then configured by ADS. IP addresses are assigned to the server and an e-mail message is then automatically generated and sent to the customer, containing all their relevant server details. The entire transaction takes under 15 minutes, including sending a customer their IP addresses and the account information needed to begin using the server. Previously, configuring a dedicated server would take hours of employee time, resulting in a lengthy waiting time for customers.
Fasthosts employees can add new server capacity easily with ADS. The service highlights where server capacity is needed, and an employee adds the server manually. ADS then takes over and deploys the appropriate image onto the server and communicates which network port should be added.
Large-Scale Operations Managed Easily
Prior to implementing Windows, Jeffries explains that the organisation was unable to offer a dedicated server platform that could scale to deploying thousands of servers without requiring a huge increase in IT resources. “Customers had to wait too long for provisioning, and employees spent too much time building servers,” he says.
Fasthosts now has more than 3,300 servers actively deployed, and more than 2,500 customers use the dedicated server system. Through the use of remote administration cards, employees only need to spend time in the data centre when adding new servers. All fault finding and maintenance is handled remotely through ADS.
Inbuilt Security Requires Minimal Intervention
Fasthosts delivers excellent protection across all of its dedicated server environments. Jeffries says: “We have more than 1 million domains under management and use Active Directory to manage all the security for those domains. With IIS, we can protect individual customer server security from cross infection by another server.”
IIS 6.0 is designed to prevent a malfunctioning Web site or application from disrupting the operation of other Web applications and servers. “The fact that we have had so few problems and so many customers is testimony to the stability of the system,” says Jeffries. And IT support workers can spend more of time adding value on more strategic tasks.
Flexible Service Enhances Business Growth
Fasthosts’ decision to support both Microsoft and Linux server environments from the Microsoft platform helped the company to be at the forefront of the hosted services industry. “When we launched the Linux and Windows automated dedicated server service, it was unheard of,” says Jeffries. “But our initial sales were more than double our initial predictions.” The company was first to market to offer both services, and now dozens of other providers have followed suit.
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange
For More Information
For further information about Microsoft products and services, please visit
www.microsoft.com/uk
or call 0870 60 10 100*
For hearing impaired customers with a Minicom, contact: 0870 50 30 400*
*Lines are open 8am-6pm Monday to Friday. Please note, numbers prefixed 0870 will be charged at national call rates. For details of national call rate charges, please contact your telecommunications provider.
For more information about Fasthosts products and services, call (+44) 0870 888 3600 or visit the Web site at: http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2007
