Revera

Infrastructure Specialist Uses Virtualization to Provide Better Service At Lower Cost

Revera specializes in providing businesses with high-integrity computing infrastructure and services. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Revera offers enterprise-grade server hosting, which helps lower customers’ cost of IT operations and ensures that data is safe and easily accessible. The company is expanding its infrastructure services with Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ to provide customers with a Virtual Infrastructure Services offering that can cost 30 percent less than hosting services for physical servers. Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager simplifies server management with a single point of control, reducing the need to retrain staff to support virtual servers running on different virtualization products. Revera’s deployment of Hyper-V for its own line-of-business applications is expected to produce an internal rate of return of 72 percent.

 

Situation

Revera, an infrastructure specialist company headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, provides its business customers with high-integrity computing infrastructure and services. Revera primarily serves companies and government organizations in New Zealand and Australia. The company offers hosting services for applications, collaboration and messaging systems, desktop management, network delivery, backup, and disaster recovery systems.

Revera has three data centers in New Zealand plus one in Melbourne, Australia. These data centers have the capacity to support 5,000 physical servers and 67,000 virtual servers. Revera’s state-of-the-art “Type-R” data centers use a specialized airflow system to precisely manage the cooling requirements of high-density computing. The advanced climate control removes hotspots and reduces the energy required, providing a more environmentally friendly computing situation.

Figure 1. Type-R eco-pods efficiently manage airflow and power systems.

For several years, Revera has offered server virtualization based on VMware software. “Virtualization of IT is nothing new for us at Revera,” explains Roger Cockayne, Group Managing Director and Co-Founder of Revera. “Our group has been doing server virtualization for four years, and I’ve been around virtualization for 20-plus years, since before we were known as Revera.”

Revera would like to expand its Virtual Infrastructure Services offering, which rents units of virtual machine capacity including CPU, memory, network infrastructure, and storage area network (SAN) to customers on a monthly "pay-per-use" basis. Revera’s Virtual Infrastructure Services was designed with the highest availability in mind and is built on robust enterprise-class blade servers, highly available network infrastructure, and high-speed fibre channel storage subsystems.

The company believes that virtualization will be a significant growth area in the coming years in the New Zealand and Australia markets. “Organizations are running out of server room and are experiencing the high cost of supporting physical servers,” explains Robin Cockayne, General Manager of Marketing for Revera.

To support its expected growth, Revera needed a server virtualization solution that simplifies server management tasks and allows secure delegation of specific tasks to lower support tiers. Revera manages many different environments for customers and administration for each of them has different requirements. Revera needed a flexible solution that provided a single user interface for management across the company’s virtual server environments. In addition, it looked for a server virtualization solution that proved cost effective for its customers.

Solution

Revera sees the arrival of the Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization technology and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager as simplifying server management and providing a more cost effective option for most customers. “There is a gap in the market for doing server virtualization well but also cost effectively. Hyper-V is filling this gap,” says Robin Cockayne.

Revera began testing Hyper-V in February 2008 as a part of the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program, and it began the physical-to-virtual conversion of its internal business applications in June 2008. Revera’s server management database, e-mail, domain controller, and file/print servers are currently in production on Hyper-V.  Revera is aiming to offer Hyper-V to customers in September 2008.

If an existing customer needs a new virtual server up and running right away, we can often do this in one hour. This is huge for a customer that needs to deploy new applications rapidly. Robin Cockayne General Manager of Marketing, Revera

Richard McGlashen, Product Development Technical Specialist at Revera explains, “Our method for deploying new technology is to use it on ourselves and run our own business on it. This helps train our internal technicians, but more importantly we get a business sense of how it works.”

Revera’s Virtual Infrastructure Services offering will benefit tremendously from the capabilities of Hyper-V, which is a key feature of Windows Server 2008. The infrastructure services design boasts redundancy for every component with no single points of failure. The enhanced Virtual Infrastructure Services offering will enable Revera’s customers to migrate virtualization candidates from physical hardware and reap the benefits of a lower-cost service with increased capabilities such as availability, portability, and rapid scalability.

The cost to deploy the Hyper-V solution on internal applications totals NZ$447,000 (U.S.$329,797) over three years and includes migration, training for server administrators, physical-to-virtual conversion, hardware, licensing, and support.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager integrates with Hyper-V and other products to provide a comprehensive management solution for Revera’s virtualized data center. System Center Virtual Machine Manager helps enable increased physical server utilization and centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides end-to-end support for consolidating physical servers onto a virtual infrastructure, which they are achieving with their internal business applications. System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides a complete library, which allows server administrators to centrally manage all the building blocks of the virtual data center. Revera takes advantage of these capabilities to rapidly deploy and migrate virtual machines.

Further, using System Center Virtual Machine Manager helps Revera improve the management of its servers. According to Robin Cockayne, System Center Virtual Machine Manager will serve as a single point of control for all virtual machine instances. “Its tight integration with System Center Operations Manager will provide a single user interface for managing operations across all of our servers: virtual or physical, Windows® and non-Windows. We don’t have to retrain our support staff on multiple products.”

Robin Cockayne summarizes, “We are proving that server virtualization is cost-effective and beneficial for small and mid-sized organizations in addition to large organizations. Virtualization can yield dramatic cost savings and a substantial increase in IT agility.”

Benefits

Revera expects Hyper-V to increase its revenue by helping the company to provide cost-effective virtualization services. Revera customers will benefit from reduced server hosting costs, in many cases by up to 30 percent, and the ability to more quickly deploy applications. In addition, Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager are expected to provide significant savings related to server management. Revera’s deployment of Hyper-V for its internal business applications is expected to produce a three-year internal rate of return of 72 percent. This result is based on a three-year total cost of NZ$447,000 (U.S.$326,712) outweighed by cost savings of NZ$508,000 (U.S.$374,871).

Increased Cost Savings with Server Virtualization

Hyper-V is providing a more affordable option for hosted server management. Robin Cockayne explains, “Customers will benefit from hosted server management so they can focus on their core business. They will no longer have spikes in capital budgets for expensive hardware purchases every three to four years. When hardware is managed on premises, customers frequently overbuy hardware because they are not sure what they will need and it is more difficult to add memory and disk capacity after you’ve already deployed. With a hosted solution, customers don’t have to dedicate IT support staff to the work associated with a hardware refresh cycle, which could be one full year of work in every three.”

The benefits of hosted server management are enhanced when customers consider server virtualization. McGlashen explains, “There are only a few situations in which servers cannot be converted from physical to virtual. We are converting 95 percent of our internal servers. There are several factors in pricing, but in many cases virtual servers have a lower price yet provide increased redundancy and higher availability. Our service level agreements for virtual servers are normally higher than for the typical physical server that we host.” With physical to virtual server conversion, Revera can consolidate the equivalent computing from 20 to 3 racks.

With the price advantage that customers experience, Revera expects to attract organizations to its Virtual Infrastructure Services offering and increase its revenue. Revera is hosting its own internal applications and the potential cost savings is estimated to be NZ$147,000 (U.S.$108,430) per year with 95 percent of their servers converted from physical to virtual.

Reduced Server Administration Costs

System Center Virtual Machine Manager provides administrators with a complete view of virtual server environments, including virtualization technologies from Citrix and VMware, and allows them to perform all administration tasks from one central console. This complete view will reduce the amount of training required to manage environments. Robin Cockayne explains, “With System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the training required for our server administrators on a new environment would be 40 percent of what it would be before, as they no longer have to learn a new management tool. Before, we had to train people on the different interfaces for each virtualization technology we run. Its integration with System Center Operations Manager provides us unified management across physical, virtual, Windows, and non-Windows environments. Now we tell our first level of support how you find a machine, which data center it is located in, and how you reset it.”

Figure 2. Hyper-V Deployment Project Cash Flow

Support costs will decrease as the central console can be more easily managed. McGlashen says, “In the past, our high-level technical engineers have handled all of the support issues related to virtualization. With System Center Virtual Machine Manager, we expect that our Tier 1 and Tier 2 support resources will be able to handle common virtualization management tasks such as managing server resources, creating snapshots, and moving and restarting machines. It simplifies management.” Revera estimates that 40 percent of the support tasks and help desk calls for virtualization could be transitioned to more cost effective server administrator support due to System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Administrative tasks such as increasing the server processing capability are much easier with server virtualization. McGlashen says, “With virtual server management, we are saving one to two hours each time we execute a disk capacity increase, and we do at least four of these every month.”

“Since System Center Virtual Machine Manager is running on Windows PowerShell™, anything you do through the interface, you can do through a Windows PowerShell command,” describes McGlashen. “This means there is a common language, so we can script across one interface to deploy across any hypervisor that we are running.” The cost savings for Revera from improved server management of its internal applications is estimated to be NZ$5,000 (U.S.$3,690) per year.

Faster Deployment

“Deploying servers virtually saves so much time in both effort and elapsed time,” explains Robin Cockayne. For an existing customer, a new virtual machine can be deployed as quickly as within one hour compared to three to four weeks with a physical server. The lengthy purchasing process for a physical server normally stretches the cycle time for deploying a new physical server to several weeks. In addition, a server administrator’s work effort for deploying a virtual server is much less than for a physical server—an estimated 8 to 10 hours for a physical server compared to one hour for a virtual server.

Revera customers benefit from the flexibility and scalability of a virtual server environment. Customers only have to pay for what they need and they can quickly increase or even reduce servers. Robin Cockayne explains, “If an existing customer needs a new virtual server up and running right away, we can often do this in one hour. This is huge for a customer that needs to deploy new applications rapidly.” With Revera’s Infrastructure Virtualization Services offering, customers request the memory and processing capability required, and they can pay month-by-month for a Virtual Machine Unit.

High Availability

McGlashen explains the redundancy benefits of server virtualization. “Clustering is much easier with virtual servers. Our Service Level Agreements for virtual servers are normally higher than for the typical physical server that we host. For physical servers to match the redundancy of virtual machines, there is a significant amount of additional setup time and cost required.” Flexibility and improved management is supported by features such as quick migration of virtual machines from one physical host to another.

Electricity Savings and Environmental Benefits

Revera’s data center is providing more advanced power management. A virtual machine uses an estimated 9 percent of the power of a typical physical server. In addition to the environmental benefit of using less electricity, there is also associated cost savings for Revera and its customers. For Revera, the estimated savings is NZ$15,000 (U.S.$11,073) per year in electricity bills and the supporting power infrastructure; however, this amount is much higher for its larger server deployments.

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

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 Revera products and services, call (64) 0508 738372 or visit the Web site at:
www.revera.co.nz