WorleyParsons

Engineering Services Company Reduces Hardware, Support Costs With Virtualization

Headquartered in Australia, WorleyParsons provides professional services to the energy, resource, and complex process industries. WorleyParsons has grown revenue from AU$0.5 billion to $3.5 billion (U.S.$0.48 billion to $3.3 billion) over the past five years. The company relies on an agile and flexible IT infrastructure to deliver the expanding business applications required for sustaining growth, and it is deploying Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ to help reduce the growing costs associated with rapid global expansion. Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager will help simplify server management and the physical to virtual server conversion as WorleyParsons converts 50 percent of its physical servers to virtual servers. This conversion is expected to reduce hardware costs and space requirements, improve server management, and facilitate faster deployment of applications.

Situation

WorleyParsons is a leading provider of professional services to the energy, resource, and complex process industries. Headquartered in Australia, WorleyParsons is one of the world’s largest engineering design firms with revenues of AU$3.5 billion (U.S.$3.3 billion) in 2007. Its employees provide engineering design and project services in 34 countries around the globe.

WorleyParsons has grown revenues by 650 percent from 2003 to 2007 via new acquisitions and rapid organic growth. In the same period, its profit has increased almost 10 times, from AU$26 million (U.S.$24.6 million) to AU$225 million (U.S.$213 million). Vito Forte, Chief Information Officer for WorleyParsons, explains the challenges for IT with this growth. “About half of our growth is organic and the other half is through acquisitions. With acquisitions, things are frequently pieced together and we need to make sure that we are delivering IT services in a consistent way.” He continues, “There are greater expectations than when we were small. The business has expectations on flexibility and agility that we need to achieve, especially with the changes in the energy business.”

Figure 1. WorleyParsons has grown revenues 650 percent over the past five years.

Fifty percent of WorleyParsons’s business is related to contract alliances, typically in the form of a long-term partnership with a global energy provider. WorleyParsons needs to provide its employees with a toolkit that will work in joint ventures, which are often located in remote locations such as northern Canada or an offshore oil platform in subarctic waters. Currently the contract transition period—the time from contract signing to work beginning—for large projects can take up to 12 months. To support its goal of reducing this time from 12 to 3 months, WorleyParsons needs the ability to deliver applications more quickly.

Four data centers—located in Australia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—support WorleyParsons’s global business. Approximately 120 of its 480 IT staff are server administrators who support 1,300 servers. Because of its rapid growth, WorleyParsons was running out of physical space and its server administrators were challenged to manage the required growth in a cost-effective manner. WorleyParsons planned for its data centers to support three key areas of business needs:

• Consistency in IT service delivery
• Speed, with faster project setup and revenue achievement
• Flexibility and the ability to change course when needed

Several years ago, WorleyParsons began looking at server virtualization as a way to help reduce the hardware and management costs and increase flexibility. Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 was deployed in limited use.

Solution

While Virtual Server 2005 R2 helped reduce the number of physical servers, WorleyParsons began deploying the Windows Server® 2008 operating system in April 2008 to take advantage of new virtualization capabilities that would help improve server management even more.

The arrival of the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization technology and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has provided WorleyParsons with a way to deploy virtualization on a much wider basis. WorleyParsons began testing Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager in early 2008. Hyper-V is active in the company’s data centers located in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The company considered other providers, but felt that the Microsoft solution fit its overall IT strategy the best and provided the highest value.

WorleyParsons has taken advantage of improvements in management, clustering, and physical to virtual conversion. Phil Kavanagh, Senior Systems Administrator at WorleyParsons explains, “Clustering works really well in Hyper-V, especially compared to Virtual Server 2005. It is much easier to configure and failover is very good.”

Virtualization with Hyper-V is providing the ability to deliver applications quickly, and this is what we need to do to differentiate ourselves from competition. Vito Forte Chief Information Officer, WorleyParsons

Hyper-V provides WorleyParsons with scalability and high performance. Windows® hypervisor, a core component of Hyper-V, is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the operating system that allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously while providing strong isolation between partitions and an architecture that has minimal attack surface. WorleyParsons is taking advantage of the enhanced reliability and security with Hyper-V and the hypervisor component. Manageability is also improved through features such as quick migration of virtual machines from one physical host to another.

WorleyParsons has several workloads such as anti-virus and Web servers in production on Hyper-V and is continuing its migration to virtualization. WorleyParsons is pleased with the stability and performance of Hyper-V. “With Hyper-V, our goal is to convert 50 percent of our servers from physical to virtual servers,” explains Forte. “Hyper-V will support our business goals in several ways. Virtualization will allow us to be agile and flexible to support changing business needs. It will help drive savings in management and administration costs. Hyper-V will support our data recovery initiative, which will save millions of dollars.”

With the conversion from physical to virtual servers, WorleyParsons will benefit from the improved server management capabilities associated with virtual servers almost immediately. The physical to virtual conversion takes only a couple of hours. The actual conversion can be done in 1.5 hours plus a couple of hours for related activities, such as identifying the server, providing a reason for virtualization, documenting performance measures, and providing change control.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provides WorleyParsons with a comprehensive management solution for the virtualized data center. Server utilization has been improved from 5 to 15 percent to more than 50 percent with centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure. System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides intelligent placement of virtual workloads on the best-suited physical host servers.

The management console of System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a significant improvement over Virtual Server 2005. Michael Alberghini, Manager, WorleyParsons Group ICT Infrastructure and Architecture explains, “System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides an excellent viewpoint with a clear enterprise-wide view of servers. Before, we had to log on to separate servers, so this will save time spent on server administration.”

Benefits

Hyper-V will help WorleyParsons improve server management, reduce data recovery costs, and deploy applications faster. The virtualization project is expected to produce a three-year internal rate of return of 100 percent and have a net present value of more than AU$1.2 million (U.S.$1.13 million). This result is based on a cost of AU$739,000 (U.S.$700,000) to test Hyper-V and install System Center Virtual Machine Manager and annual benefits, in terms of cost savings, of AU$846,000 (U.S.$801,700).

Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager are helping WorleyParsons reduce costs, achieve faster project setup, increase revenue, and improve its ability to change course when needed.

Reduced Server Administration Costs

Figure 2. The deployment of Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager at WorleyParsons will deliver significant benefits. The project is expected to have an internal rate of return of 100 percent.

“Shifting to Hyper-V we expect to see significant savings, especially in terms of administrative tasks associated with servers,” says Alberghini. With WorleyParsons’s recent growth, the number of servers each administrator needs to support has increased. However, WorleyParsons expects the Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager deployment to simplify administration activities and allow its server administrators to readily support the growth. Alberghini explains, “With Virtual Server 2005 we were able to see an increase in the number of servers supported by each administrator. We expect this to improve with Hyper-V and allow our server administrators to spend more time focusing on service delivery and other value-added areas.”

Building a physical server took almost four hours before virtualization. Hyper-V has helped decrease this time to 20 minutes because of the templates and streamlined processes with virtualization. The simplified management console in System Center Virtual Machine Manager reduces this time even more, so build time is down to 10 minutes. The timesavings associated with building new servers will allow WorleyParsons to deploy business applications much faster. The value of the time savings associated with the server management improvements is estimated to be AU$1,055,000 (U.S.$999,985) per year.

Improved Data Recovery Services

Hyper-V is a key part of WorleyParsons’s data recovery services initiative. Alberghini explains, “Before, the process for data recovery took a long time. The ability to improve data recovery on the server is a huge benefit for WorleyParsons, which can be attributed to Hyper-V.” Prior to server virtualization, it took one full day to restore a server. With Hyper-V, a server can be restored in one hour.

Application downtime has also been reduced with Hyper-V. Virtualization helps keep applications running through isolating applications and drivers for less frequent reboots. Virtualization also makes it easier to deploy clustered workloads, which offers improved protection. With virtualization, a typical outage may be 30 seconds, whereas a typical outage for a physical server is three to five minutes. The shorter outage is a result of the reduction in downtime associated with patching, testing, and reboot. With Hyper-V, WorleyParsons is providing an appropriate level of recoverability and expects an estimated annual savings of AU$167,000 (U.S.$158,291).

Increased Agility and Faster Deployment of Applications

WorleyParsons frequently participates in joint ventures that require a fast turnaround for server provisioning and application deployment. Forte explains, “In the past this would require deploying a new physical server, which could take three weeks because of the time involved in purchasing and setting up the server. With Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, we now have the templates and ability to provision in a much shorter timeframe.” Server deployment can now be done in one day. Forte continues, “Virtualization with Hyper-V is providing the ability to deliver applications quickly, and this is what we need to do to differentiate ourselves from competition.”

The increased agility supports WorleyParsons’s goal of faster ramp up of projects. With hundreds of projects initiated every year, a faster initiation of projects will accelerate the revenue generated by the company.

“Reducing the contract transition period will generate millions of dollars in benefits,” says Forte. “Hyper-V is one of the tools that will help support this initiative by providing the ability to run highly distributed environments in a consolidated fashion.” In the energy business, agility is essential to supporting the business need to change course as necessary.

Hyper-V is providing improved support for remote business operations, which are common at WorleyParsons. “With virtualization, the location of the infrastructure will be based on availability to achieve services rather than physical location,” explains Alberghini.

Reduced Hardware Costs

With WorleyParsons converting 50 percent of its physical servers to virtual servers, the company expects a significant reduction in hardware footprint and costs. Virtualization is required in data centers such as Perth, Australia, where there is no room for additional physical servers. Without virtualization, WorleyParsons would incur significant costs in data center real estate or services from a server hosting provider—costs that could have doubled over the next several years.

Environmental and Social Sustainability

WorleyParsons has developed a business initiative called EcoNomics to deliver environmentally, socially, and financially sustainable projects for customers. It is a new offering of services that recognizes that environmental and social imperatives now affect the bottom line for all major corporations and projects around the world.

Hyper-V is helping to improve the environmental impact of its own internal service delivery by running more energy efficient server rooms. By decreasing the number of servers and reducing the electricity to run applications, there is an environmental benefit.

About Piedmont Consultants

This business value case study was developed by Piedmont Consultants, a specialized technology marketing firm that helps technology companies implement a value-based approach to selling their products and services. For more information about Piedmont Consultants, visit the Web site at:
www.piedmontconsultants.com

 
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

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www.microsoft.com

For more information about Worley Parsons products and services, call (+61) 2 8923 6866 or visit the Web site at:
www.worleyparsons.com