Sporton Lab

Certification Services Firm Uses Hypervisor Solution to Cut IT Costs, Improve Service

Sporton International is a mobile communications certification company in Taiwan. Sporton had an overcrowded data center, incurring rising electricity and cooling costs for underutilized servers. Using manual provisioning and administration processes, IT employees were unable to respond quickly to requests from Sporton's developers for test environments. All that changed when Sporton deployed a virtualization solution with the Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ technology. Sporton virtualized servers in the production environment, increasing performance and reliability while saving 70 percent in server costs and improving server utilization up to 60 percent. IT staff use Hyper-V to provision servers in minutes and perform quick migration of virtual machines for robust business continuity—enhancements that are turning Sporton’s IT department into a business enabler instead of a cost center.

 

Situation

Headquartered in Taipei County, Taiwan, Sporton International provides electromagnetic compatibility services, safety regulation detection, wireless network connection, mobile phone authentication, and digital television authentication services. Its customers include mobile phone manufacturers, IT and product manufacturers, and chipset designers. Sporton operates in the domestic and overseas markets, also serving customers in China and Korea. The company faces increasing competition in a global market and it relies heavily on its in-house ERP system to automate business processes and information flow to ensure its authentication certifications are issued to customers on time. However, Sporton has also been evaluating additional ways to increase revenue by better utilizing other technology assets to reduce operational costs and provide better customer service.

To that end, Sporton has been working with its technology partner, Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Systex, to build a cost-effective, integrated IT infrastructure based on Microsoft technologies. Recently, the company focused on reducing server management costs and increasing efficiencies in its data center. Located at company headquarters, the data center houses 50 servers. An additional 12 servers are in remote locations. Six satellite offices in Taiwan connect to headquarters using high-speed lease lines, and three locations in China and one in Korea use virtual private networks. Until recently, all servers were running the Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 R2 Enterprise x86/x64 operating system with Service Pack 2 and the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. 

Managing and maintaining more than 60 servers is a big challenge for employees in the IT department, so the company always looks for good management solutions to ease their workload and provide quick disaster response.

Rising Data Center Costs

Data center overcrowding was rapidly becoming an issue for Sporton, although the company strives to contain the number of servers it purchases. Over the years, the company’s policy had been to assign a single server to each mission-critical application or workload it acquired. The idea was to improve server stability by simplifying the workload, and while the company was successful in this regard—maintaining a 99.9 percent uptime—the resulting server sprawl finally forced a reevaluation of the policy. Sporton was concerned about rising electricity and cooling costs, as well as increasing hardware expenses as it bought more and more servers to host new applications and maintain stability.

Inefficient Server Management

Server sprawl was not the only problem facing Sporton. Overworked IT staffers had few management tools available to automate routine tasks, and their manual workarounds for server management drove up IT administration costs. They had to locate a server and install, configure, and test the operating system every time they tested new IT products before deploying them into the production environment. And to simulate the impact of updates to mission-critical services, they had to use physical servers, spending hours re-creating the production server environment. If the update caused compatibility or stability issues, staffers would have to fix the problem and rebuild the test environment.

Since deploying Hyper-V, we have reduced hardware requirements by a one-to-seven ratio, saving more than 70 percent of our hardware costs. Kathy Lin IT Manager, Sporton International

With more developers than IT staff, Sporton’s data center employees were often called upon to help developers test new development technologies and database servers as new code. IT staffers had to locate and reconfigure test servers repeatedly in order to support the iterative development process. This unnecessarily lengthened development cycle times, which meant customers had to wait longer for their certifications. To ensure high-quality customer service, the Sporton development team needed to increase control over the development process and decrease the development cycle.

Finally, the existing solution impeded Sporton’s business goals for high availability, and efficient disaster recovery. Sporton didn’t have the time or money to create physical server clusters to improve redundancy. And if a server failed, Sporton IT employees took several hours to manually install a new backup server, disrupting service to the business. To achieve these goals, Sporton wanted to take advantage of the enhanced security features, improved clustering capabilities, and high performance of Windows Server 2008, but the company was unable to migrate older, custom-designed applications that would not run on the newer operating system.

“We didn’t want our data center to be a cost center,” says Kathy Lin, IT Manager, Sporton International. “Instead, we wanted to provide responsive, cost-effective IT service that supports our business goals. We knew about the benefits of server consolidation, and in an attempt to save money and free up space in our data center, we originally planned to purchase VMware. But the user interface was unfriendly and inflexible, and it was too expensive for a mid-sized company like Sporton. We were not getting a good return on investment, so we turned to our partner Systex for help.” 

Solution

Sporton first approached Systex in 2006. Systex immediately recommended a Microsoft virtualization solution, including Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Systex made the recommendation based on the solution’s compatibility with Sporton International’s Microsoft IT infrastructure. Systex personnel also felt that Sporton would reap the benefits of an integrated virtualization solution and a set of tools specially designed to help manage newly created virtual machines.

“VMware was not cost effective for Sporton,” says David Feng, Director, Technical Service Department at Systex. “Instead, we used Virtual Server 2005 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to illustrate the power of virtualization by deploying them straight into Sporton’s production environment.”

The Systex team deployed 15 virtual machines on Virtual Server 2005 R2. Of those 15, 10 were allocated for the test and development environment.

Sporton’s IT staff used System Center Virtual Machine Manager to help reduce administration time and expense. “System Center Virtual Machine Manager made centralized deployment and management of our virtual machines easy,” says Lin. “We saved time with efficient physical-to-virtual conversion, and developers took advantage of the centralized self-serve portal to provision their own test and development environments, which freed up some time for the IT staff.”

It was an auspicious beginning to Sporton’s virtualization strategy, now firmly centered on Microsoft technologies. However, the IT department had plans to migrate all its servers to Windows Server 2008 as soon as it became available, so the group was looking ahead to the benefits of Hyper-V™. The new Hyper-V technology is a thin layer of software that is integrated into the Windows Server 2008 operating system to provide a more dynamic, reliable, and scalable virtualization environment. Systex recommended that Sporton join the Microsoft Hyper-V Technology Adoption Program (TAP).

“Hyper-V is the best virtualization solution running on Windows Server 2008, with enhanced performance and stability for Sporton at a fraction of the cost of VMware’s hypervisor-based offering,” says Feng. “Unlike Virtual Server 2005 R2, Hyper-V has the ability to run 64-bit virtual machines to support much larger physical memory space, so it’s the logical choice to migrate Sporton’s mainly 64-bit Windows Server 2003–based server infrastructure. The IT staff members are already familiar with the Virtual Server R2 interface and operations, so it would be an easy step up.” 

 “Systex played a very important, supportive role during our Microsoft virtualization solution deployment,” says Lin. “They helped to show us how Microsoft virtualization technologies can provide a holistic virtualization solution with long-term vision.” 

Hyper-V is the best virtualization solution running on Windows Server 2008, with enhanced performance and stability for Sporton at a fraction of the cost of VMware’s hypervisor-based offering. David Feng Director, Technical Service Department, Systex

In November 2007, the Systex team evaluated server workload using the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Solution Accelerator tool, called MAP, to begin the virtualization assessment and migration project for Sporton. Team members used the tool to collect the performance metrics of every server in the data center to identify which servers were capable of running Hyper-V. “The MAP tool decreased the planning time for this project by 60 percent,” says Feng.

Then the Systex team met with Sporton IT staff members to test Hyper-V in the company’s lab environment, which lasted approximately a month. The test results were very encouraging. “The performance was so good that developers and users thought they were accessing the real servers, and the uptime of the Hyper-V virtual machines achieved an amazing rate of 99.7 percent,” reports Lin.

Then Systex and Sporton’s IT staffers migrated 35 physical production servers to Hyper-V running on three physical servers. And because Hyper-V uses the same virtual hard drive format as Virtual Server 2005 R2, it was easy for Sporton to migrate the 12 virtual machines (VMs) it had running in this earlier technology. The 23 newly created VMs include mission-critical production services such as the company’s enterprise resource planning solution, its public-facing Web site, antivirus system, second domain controllers, infrastructure servers, certificates servers, FTP servers, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007–based servers. Twelve are now used extensively for tests in the development environment. 

“During the Hyper-V TAP, we saw lots of promise,” says Lin. “Hyper-V in Release Candidate 0 was so reliable that we deployed VMs into the production environment serving all Internet guests and customers, and our subsidiaries in Taiwan, China, and Korea.”

This server consolidation and software testing and deployment scenario represents the first phase in Sporton’s virtualization project. In May 2008, when the Release Candidate 1 for Hyper-V became available, the second phase, focusing on business continuity and disaster recovery, began. This time, Systex and Sporton created another 10 Windows Server 2008–based VMs with Hyper-V clustering technology.

Hyper-V is capable of performing quick migration of VMs. Systex used this capability to enable high availability for Sporton’s critical applications and services. Quick migration of a virtual machine from one physical machine to another causes minimal downtime. This capability combined with host clustering of physical machines provides high availability. “We expect to migrate some mission-critical servers to Hyper-V and use host clustering by the end of May,” says Feng.

The third phase of Sporton’s virtualization project will focus on building an agile data center using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which is optimized for use with Hyper-V. It provides rapid virtual machine provisioning, performance and resource optimization, a centralized VM source library, centralized monitoring and rapid deployment of VM templates. “Microsoft does a great job of integrating management tools with its virtualization solutions, making it a feasible, economical, and practical option for Sporton,” adds Lin. “At Sporton, our goal is to virtualize as many servers as possible on Hyper-V, with another 30 in production by the end of 2008.”

Benefits

Sporton International’s virtualization solution is improving the efficiency of its data center operations and enhancing Sporton’s responsiveness to evolving business requirements. Since participating in the Hyper-V TAP, Sporton is optimizing hardware resources, improving server provisioning, and increasing server availability to cut costs, drive agility, and improve disaster recovery scenarios. “Hyper-V delivers a new level of performance and reliability,” says Lin. “With 64-bit guest support and multiprocessor support and a new high-speed input/output architecture, we’re getting such fast response that our users aren’t aware they are accessing virtual machines.” 

Optimizing Hardware Assets to Cut Costs

Sporton is getting more value out of its hardware resources by using Hyper-V to consolidate workloads more efficiently on single servers. Now Sporton’s IT department can support the business with less hardware, resulting in lower equipment costs, reduced electrical consumption, and more space in the data center. “Since deploying Hyper-V, we have reduced hardware requirements by a one-to-seven ratio, saving more than 70 percent of our hardware costs,” says Lin. “We’ve increased server utilization from 10 to 15 percent to more than 70 percent because a single quad-core server running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V can host as many as seven virtual servers.”

Sporton plans to use Hyper-V to host its older applications that are running on outdated operating systems, benefitting at the same time from the high performance and reliability of the Windows Server 2008 operating system. “Now we won’t have to manage different operating systems on different physical servers. Any time we can reduce the complexity of our server environment, we will save money in management costs,” says Lin.

Streamlining Provisioning to Boost Responsive IT Service

Sporton has a more responsive data center, thanks to the dynamic resource management in Hyper-V. IT staffers provision servers much more quickly, supporting the demands of Sporton’s active developer community.

Hyper-V in Release Candidate 0 was so reliable that we deployed VMs into the production environment serving all Internet guests and customers, and our subsidiaries in Taiwan, China, and Korea. Kathy Lin, IT Manager, Sporton International

“We have cut the time it takes for our IT staff to provision a server by up to 70 percent, providing developers with new test environments in minutes, rather than hours, to test their codes in different situations before the final bits release,” says Lin. “In this way, development teams can produce 20 percent, or more, bits in 30 percent less time. This increases the productivity of both IT and the development teams to reduce development cycles so we can achieve more efficient product development and better customer service.”

IT staffers can also add resources such as CPUs, memory, networks, and storage to VMs dynamically, as required by the business. “We are saving 80 percent in the time it takes to test new service packs and updates,” says Lin. “We use the VM snapshot capability to quickly save the state of a VM before and after applying the update or service pack. If something is wrong with the update, we can quickly revert back to the original state.”

Improving Availability for Better Business Continuity

With Hyper-V, Sporton’s disaster recovery capabilities are more robust, providing a rapid recovery strategy that the company hasn’t had before. Instead of achieving high availability by buying more servers to host single applications, Sporton has found a more affordable option by using Hyper-V to host more VMs per clustering server and help ensure the uptime mandated by the business. Using dynamic resource management and quick migration of virtual machines, IT staffers can quickly move one VM to another in the event of a server failure. They can also improve clustering services while using fewer physical servers.

“With Hyper-V, I’m proving to my general manager that by using the right Microsoft technologies the IT department can save lots of money and provide better service,” concludes Lin.

Microsoft Virtualization
Microsoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.

For more information about Microsoft virtualization solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/virtualization  

 

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Systex products and services, call +886-960-000-326 or visit the Web site at:
www.systex.com.tw

For more information about Sporton International products and services, call +886-2-2696-2468 or visit the Web site at:
www.sporton.com.tw or
www.rfi-sporton.com