4-page Case Study - Posted 9/8/2008

Views: 869

Rate This Evidence:

LeaseWeb

Virtual Platform Boosts Hosting Firm’s Growth and Client Services

According to HostReview magazine, Netherlands-based LeaseWeb is the world’s fastest growing Web-hosting company, having doubled its employees and its hosting network capacity during 2007. The company is also Dell’s largest Internet partner in Europe and a leader in “green” hosting. LeaseWeb continually evaluates state-of-the-art technology to improve the quality, range, and cost-effectiveness of its customer services and to reduce its environmental footprint. In 2008, it turned to virtualization and Microsoft® Virtualization technology to help meet its goals and to ensure continued strong growth. While participating in the Rapid Deployment Program for Hyper-V™ (part of Windows Server 2008) and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, LeaseWeb found that Microsoft software was easier to implement and cost less than rival offerings, and enabled it to meet its goals.

Situation

Formed in 1997 in Amsterdam, LeaseWeb provides such services as domain names Web hosting, dedicated server hosting, colocation, streaming, and virtual private servers for business customers. Although the company’s clients include large corporations such as NTT, Starbucks, Wige Media AG, Telenet, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Alcatel-Lucent, most of its customers are international individuals and small and midsize businesses.

Deploying a Web server on Hyper-V is faster and less expensive than deploying it on a physical server, reduces the total cost of ownership, and helps to ensure LeaseWeb’s long-term success. Jaap Wesselius Senior Consultant, LeaseWeb

LeaseWeb manages more than 11,000 servers in five data centers across the Netherlands. These data centers host millions of Web sites and scores of software applications.

The company operates a mostly Linux environment. About three years ago, it began increasing its range of Microsoft® products and services, especially those based on the Windows® operating system, to address demand from both internal users and external customers.

An increasing number of LeaseWeb customers are requesting “green,” or environmentally sensitive hosting and for their services to be delivered on a virtualized platform. However, until recently, most of the company’s servers in its data centers were not green or virtualized; instead, they ran at low user efficiency and performance levels, consumed high levels of energy, and were costly to operate and maintain.

This year, as part of its goal to reduce its environmental footprint, LeaseWeb opened a Point of Presence at EvoSwitch, the first green data center in the Netherlands. It is carbon-neutral and houses 2,000 19-inch racks for blades and normal 19-inch servers. The company is planning to add 500 server racks this year to meet customer demand.

“Energy consumption is now the biggest expense in data centers, and from a social perspective as well, it seems logical for us to reduce our energy consumption,” says Ruud Mous, LeaseWeb’s Sales Director. “There are many factors contributing to excessive energy consumption in data centers, but underused x86 server hardware is the most significant. In our network, we manage machines that sit idle for 40 to 50 percent of the time, consuming large amounts of power.”

LeaseWeb wanted to continue providing customers with environmentally sensitive services, but it needed to consider costs, power consumption, ease of administration, and growing demand.

Solution

In early 2008, LeaseWeb joined the Microsoft Virtualization Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and the Hyper-V™ technology in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager supports the consolidation of physical servers in a virtual infrastructure and provides centralized administration of the infrastructure, including the easy provisioning of virtual machines.

Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based virtualization platform in Windows Server 2008 that runs directly on the system hardware. The solution runs on Dell hardware, with Hyper-V running on Intel technology.

“LeaseWeb wants to be on the leading edge of technology,” says Mous. “It wants to offer the best and latest developments and so from this perspective, participating in the RDP was a good idea for us.”

Benefits

LeaseWeb is confident that virtualization will be a winning strategy for the company and for its customers. During the RDP, LeaseWeb established a virtualization solution based on Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager that was environmentally friendly, enabled the company to meet growing customer demand efficiently, and was cost-effective and easy to manage.

The solution will help us safely consolidate our underused server technology onto much less hardware, both through initial consolidation efforts and dynamically, as computing requirements change. Ruud Mous Sales Director, LeaseWeb

Expedites Customer Service

Through its use of provisioning on System Center Virtual Machine Manager, LeaseWeb will be able to create a faster sign-up process for customers who purchase its hosting service.

“In the past, a dedicated server was provisioned a day or so after the customer ordered it,” says Wesselius. “Now, through a provisioning system, like that in Hyper-V, LeaseWeb will be able to create an online presence for a customer in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. Customers simply sign up, enter their payment details, submit their request, and, if approved, they have an account and hosting services ready to use within a few minutes.”

Lowers Total Cost of Ownership

Wesselius says that the high availability, enhanced security, and reliability of the virtual platform are critical to the long-term success of the data center.

“To remain competitive, it is crucial that LeaseWeb finds ways of reducing its total cost of ownership. Deploying a Web server on Hyper-V faster and more cheaply than deploying it on a physical server reduces the total cost of ownership and helps to ensure LeaseWeb’s long-term success.”

Reduces Environmental Footprint

Virtualization supports not only LeaseWeb’s policy of offering the best and latest technologies to its customers, but also its green technology philosophy. The solution will allow the company to grow within cost and space limitations.

“The solution will help us safely consolidate our underused server technology onto much less hardware, both through initial consolidation efforts and dynamically, as computing requirements change,” says Mous.

Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Together, Hyper-V technology - a key feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system - and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provide a reliable virtualization technology and comprehensive management solution that make it easier for customers to virtualize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs. With integrated administration, customers can use a single console to centralize management of a heterogeneous virtual machine infrastructure; increase physical server utilization; rapidly provision new virtual machines; and provide dynamic performance and resource optimization of hardware, operating systems, and applications. Both of these technologies easily plug into existing infrastructures, so companies can continue to use their current patching, provisioning, management, and support tools and processes. This combined virtualization technology and management solution also provides great value, because customers can make the most of their IT professionals' skill set, the breadth of solutions from Microsoft partners, and comprehensive support from Microsoft.

For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/Hyper-V
www.microsoft.com/scvmm

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 LeaseWeb products and services, call +31 (0)20 3162880 or visit the Web site at:
www.leaseweb.com