2 page Case Study - Posted 3/13/2008
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Dell Simplifies Server Management, Lowers Costs, and Increases Dell.com Performance
Dell is working hard to simplify IT work for itself and its customers. By creating a low-touch infrastructure in its data centers, the company expects to lower costs and boost IT staff productivity. Key to Dell’s strategy is migrating to the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system, which projections indicate should reduce server setup time, trim application deployment time, and help to significantly reduce IT labor costs.
Business Needs
Dell pioneered online computer sales and prides itself on providing customers with a fast, easy, online buying experience. The company tries to simplify IT maintenance for customers by helping them build a low-touch, uniform infrastructure from the desktop to the data center, thus reducing the cost and complexity of technology maintenance. This will aid in reclaiming the resources needed to drive innovation in daily business processes.
Dell wanted to simplify its own IT work, too. Although Dell realized U.S.$16 billion in revenue through its Dell.com properties in 2007, the server infrastructure that supports the site was eating up more resources every year. The servers that run Dell.com had expanded at a rate of approximately 15 percent annually, consuming datacenter space, cooling and power costs, and IT staff time. With 3.2 billion page requests and 420 million visits per quarter, Dell.com required nearly 80 new servers each year to accommodate new content, new applications, and high-growth regional sites, and keep response times under four seconds globally. Intent on setting an example in its public “Simplify IT” campaign, Dell wanted to streamline its server holdings and simplify server management. The IT staff spent approximately 10 hours setting up and deploying applications on each new server, which reduced the time available to create new applications and services.
The staff was also eager to improve performance, which is critical to customer satisfaction and loyalty. In 2005, the company began to upgrade all Dell.com servers to a 64-bit operating system, which provided a huge performance boost. Still, the company knew that full performance gains would be realized only by running the latest 64-bit–capable software.
Solution
The Dell.com infrastructure was running on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system and Internet Information Services 6.0 Web server software. When Microsoft introduced Windows Server 2008, Dell was interested in taking advantage of new server-configuration, administration, and diagnostic tools in Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, a key component of Windows Server 2008.
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Our vision for the Dell.com architecture absolutely requires the new features in Windows Server 2008, which is key to our ability to simplify our online commerce environment. |
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Ben May
Senior Systems Engineer, Dell |
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“We wanted to be able to create IIS configuration settings and copy them as the application moved from development into production,” says Ben May, Senior Systems Engineer for Dell. “With this capability, as well as improvements in diagnostics and administration, we would be able to roll out changes faster.”
By deploying Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 on its Web server computers, Dell also expects to be able to boost performance, thanks to improvements in the TCP/IP network stack, the HTTP compression engine, and the removal of unused modules within IIS7. The faster the servers, the fewer servers Dell will need to run Dell.com, which will have the added benefit of reducing management costs.
Dell installed Windows Server 2008 Enterprise on one Dell PowerEdge 2950 server featuring two Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors. Using the distributed configuration features of IIS.7.0, the Dell IT staff plans to create a new e-commerce management platform that will fully automate server and application deployment. The team envisions having six to eight hefty Windows Server 2008–based servers that route traffic to back-end application servers. Dell will then be able to write business rules that dynamically point and redirect traffic as needed. “Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0 are absolutely cornerstone to how all this would work,” May says. “We will no longer have to touch individual machines; we’ll have a cloud of servers that we can direct in an automated way.”
Benefits
Dell looks forward to simplifying server management, reducing costs, consolidating servers, and improving the performance of Dell.com.
- Simplified server management. By moving to Windows Server 2008, Dell will increase system administrator productivity by reducing the time needed for server configuration and application rollout. “The new modular imaging format offers greater configuration flexibility and efficiency over a traditional unattended install,” May says. “With Windows Server 2008, server operating system installation is as much as an hour faster per server, thanks to the native usage of the Windows® Imaging Format over a traditional install, which can take 90 minutes or more. Also, the work of deploying applications is significantly faster in many cases. Everything we used to do manually will be automated from a central location.”
- Fewer servers, reduced costs. Time savings result in cost savings. May estimates that Dell will be able to save 10 to 15 hours per server, per quarter, in software upgrades, hotfixes, and reduced individual system-by-system maintenance during application changes—a significant savings. Dell will also realize savings by consolidating Web servers onto more powerful 64-bit Windows Server 2008–based systems. Over a two-year period, Dell expects to retire 250 or more Web servers and thereafter eliminate or mitigate deployment of about 80 systems per year.
- Improved performance. Dell’s first Windows Server 2008–based PowerEdge 2950 server was deployed just before the busy 2007 holiday season and handled 570 million requests—one-third more traffic than its Windows Server 2003 PowerEdge 2850 counterpart. “Our Windows Server 2008 machine scaled quite well while it handled as many as 1,800 connections versus the 1,000 connections handled by our Windows Server 2003 systems and provided equal or better performance,” May says.
“Our vision for the dell.com architecture absolutely requires the new features in Windows Server 2008, which is key to our ability to simplify our online commerce environment,” May says.
