TALX

Human Resource Service Provider Enhances Development Efficiency and Business Agility

TALX, provider of Equifax Workforce Solutions, delivers automated, Web-based human resource, payroll, and employment-verification services to more than 9,000 business customers. To maintain its industry leadership, TALX continually develops new products and services. The company wanted to enhance the agility of its development environments and bring products to market more quickly. TALX deployed the Windows Server® 2008 operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to enhance IT performance and increase efficiency by enabling development teams to self-manage their virtual machine environments. The company uses Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to develop products efficiently, reduce costs, and to maintain a competitive advantage by continually enhancing its services.

 

Situation

With more than 9,000 business customers that include a majority of Fortune 500 companies, TALX provides automated, Web-based human resource, payroll, and employment-verification services. The provider of Equifax Workforce Solutions, TALX is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, with approximately 2,000 employees. TALX develops services that replace paper-based, manual human resource and payroll management methods so its customers can offer their employees better, faster services while reducing costs.

Hewlett-Packard is our preferred hardware partner. We’ve standardized on HP for the manageability and reliability of their products and for the level of service they bring to us as a client. Bryan Garcia Vice President of Technology, TALX

TALX is an industry leader in automated employment and income verification, as well as unemployment tax management. Through Internet portals, customers can access TALX services, which include talent assessment and acquisition, electronic time capture, paperless pay, and W-2 tax-form management. Besides working directly with employers, the company provides employment and income information to 25,000 employment-verification customers.

Maintaining a wide range of applications and services helps TALX differentiate itself from its competition, and TALX relies heavily on IT systems to maintain agility in product development. The company develops its products and services in an advanced IT environment that includes virtualization technology, using Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 to host almost 70 virtual machines on more than a dozen physical servers. TALX developers perform quality assurance testing using another 12 to 15 virtual machines hosted on an additional five physical servers.

To provide customers with more comprehensive products and services, TALX constantly evolves, tests, and develops new applications, which requires the company’s developers to create new environments to support those applications. While TALX has been making effective use of virtualization to meet this need, much of the newer software that TALX is developing or utilizing requires or is optimized for 64-bit capability, which was not supported by Virtual Server 2005.

Because TALX uses virtualization in its development and testing environments, it had already consolidated many of its servers, running many virtual machines on a handful of physical servers. But the company still underutilized many servers in its development and test environments. TALX wanted to improve its virtualization performance and reduce hardware costs by installing more virtual machines per physical host and moving some underutilized physical servers into the virtualized environment.

The company also recognized that it could reduce costs and bring new products to market more quickly by increasing its use of virtualization technology and enhancing the management of its development and testing environments. To make its development environment more agile, TALX management wanted to centralize the administration of both physical servers and virtual machines and make it easier for product developers to provision new servers without always having to rely on support from IT staff. 

“In product development, we want to move very fast,” says Ram Angia, Manager of Infrastructure Development at TALX. “It’s very important to provision virtual machines quickly, and ideally, we wanted to provide our developers with self-provisioning capabilities.”

Solution

TALX began evaluating several technologies that could enhance the performance of its virtualization environments. Running the majority of its servers on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, with a limited number of servers running Windows® 2000 Server, TALX had to integrate virtualization with its existing infrastructure, and wanted to avoid relying on multiple vendors and support systems.

In early 2008, TALX participated in the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for the Hyper-VTM virtualization feature of Windows Server 2008. In its development environment, TALX deployed Hyper-V on four physical servers, each hosting up to eight virtual machines at a time. With Virtual Server 2005, the product development staff had been using virtual machines primarily for functional quality assurance testing, and in the RDP, TALX used Hyper-V to host three to four virtual machines on each of the two physical servers in its test environment.

Our development staff… will be able to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to easily handle deploying new machines. Once the quotas and security are in place, it will be very straightforward. Gregory Peterson Systems Analyst for Product Development, TALX

For several years, TALX has standardized its server environment on HP server computers, and for the RDP, it deployed Hyper-V on HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers with Intel Xeon processors. “Hewlett-Packard is our preferred hardware partner,” says Bryan Garcia, Vice President of Technology at TALX. “We’ve standardized on HP for the manageability and reliability of their products and for the level of service they bring to us as a client.”

In conjunction with the Hyper-V virtualization technology, TALX deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage both the Hyper-V and the existing Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines in its test and development environments. TALX anticipates using the self-service portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to enable developers to deploy and provision their own virtual machines. In the past, product developers had to rely on IT administrators to manually provision new servers, a process that could take from half a day to two weeks. With System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, development teams will be able to self manage their own physical servers and virtual machines. This agility will not only make the development team more productive and efficient, but it will also lessen the dependency on IT administrators.

“Our development staff, with proper constraints, will be able to use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to easily handle deploying new machines,” says Gregory Peterson, Systems Analyst for Product Development at TALX. “Once the quotas and security are in place, it will be very straightforward.”

TALX used the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit in its development environment to help identify which physical servers were candidates for virtualization. “The MAP toolkit was very helpful,” says Peterson. “It was very comprehensive in the information that it provided.”

Ultimately, TALX intends to have its test and development environment largely virtualized with a combination of Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005. In the company’s internal business-infrastructure environment, TALX is beginning to use Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 to develop and deploy some high availability failover cluster environments.

To further improve the administration and performance of its infrastructure environment, the company is in the early stages of deploying Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, using Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 to cost effectively implement some of the high availability environments.  As that deployment moves forward, TALX intends to integrate it with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, using System Center Operations Manager to provide a unified view of both physical and virtual assets across both the production and development environments.

Benefits

By participating in the Microsoft RDP for Hyper-V and deploying System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, TALX developed a blueprint for enhancing the performance of its virtualized environments. TALX can use Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to develop products more efficiently and reduce costs. Because developers will be able to provision their own machines, they can develop new TALX products and services more quickly and help the company maintain its competitive advantage.

“With Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager, we’re going to make the infrastructure a lot more flexible and a lot more agile,” says Garcia. “That’s going to contribute to improved time-to-market on products.”

Today, if we have to go out and acquire new servers, it can take two weeks from request to deployment…. Reducing that time to hours with a self-provisioning environment is going to be a big win. Bryan Garcia Vice President of Technology, TALX

Enhanced Agility
With self-provisioning capabilities in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, TALX developers can deploy new virtual machines in less than an hour, rather than the two weeks it could take with the company’s traditional acquisition and provisioning process. The enhanced agility makes the development staff more efficient and reduces pressure on IT administrators. “Today, if we have to go out and acquire new servers, it can take two weeks from request to deployment,” says Garcia. “If a development project really needs that infrastructure, that’s clearly a challenge. Reducing that time to hours with a self-provisioning environment is going to be a big win.”

Reduced Costs
TALX recently built a brand new, advanced data center. By using Hyper-V to enhance virtualization performance and host more virtual machines per physical server, TALX will be able to further consolidate its server environment, reduce hardware costs, save power and cooling costs, and conserve data center space. For each physical server that it replaces with a virtual machine, TALX will save thousands of dollars a year in hardware costs. “Using Hyper-V to attain a virtual to physical ratio of 4:1, we expect to save at least $5,000 per server per year, directly out of infrastructure costs for energy and hardware maintenance,” says Ron Francois, Manager of Infrastructure Services at TALX. “These are real savings that add up significantly by the end of the fiscal year.”

In addition, TALX expects to save as much as $1,000 in software licensing costs and support costs per each physical server it can replace with a virtual machine. The company also expects to save approximately 50 percent in annual power and cooling costs by consolidating its server environment with Hyper-V.

Improved Hardware Integration
By deploying Hyper-V on HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers with Intel Xeon processors, TALX took advantage of hardware with built-in virtualization capabilities. “The hardware helped us avoid challenges in the deployment,” says Peterson. “The HP management tools like Insight Lights Out have been a big help. We can use capabilities in Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager to remotely manage virtual machines, and also completely manage the hardware remotely. That’s a big gain for us.”

Competitive Advantage
With Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, the TALX development team can bring new products to market quickly and efficiently, providing the company with a competitive advantage. “In the employer and verifier marketplace, a lot of our competitive advantage is related to time-to-market,” says Garcia. “If we can shave days or weeks off our cycle, that’s a big plus.”

 

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 TALX products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.talx.com