4-page Case Study - Posted 9/25/2008

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SOK Group

Auto Manufacturer Virtualizes IT Environment to Help Meet Shifting Opportunities

The SOK Group is Russia’s largest automotive components manufacturer and second-largest automobile producer. With more than a dozen industrial enterprises, including joint international projects with other manufacturers and distributors, SOK needs a highly reliable and accessible IT infrastructure. The company saw that it could enhance the reliability and flexibility of its IT infrastructure by using Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ technology to virtualize workloads and consolidate servers. Since deploying Hyper-V and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, SOK has not only enhanced the reliability, scalability, and flexibility of its technology infrastructure, but also significantly reduced costs. The company now has the agility it needs to respond rapidly to constantly changing business opportunities.

Situation

One of Russia’s largest privately owned companies, the SOK Group is involved in dozens of industrial enterprises in several sectors of the domestic Russian economy, including automobile and automotive component manufacturing, car retailing, and transportation infrastructure construction. SOK is the largest automotive components manufacturer and second-largest automobile producer in Russia. Based in Samara, Russia, the SOK Group employs more than 50,000 people and has annual revenues worth nearly U.S.$3 billion.

SOK has pursued a growth strategy based in part on integrating its Russian enterprises into the world automotive industry. The company has invested in international joint manufacturing and distribution ventures, including a deal with Kia Motors of South Korea to build and sell Kia automobiles in Russia. Providing information services for such a wide-ranging and complex enterprise requires a reliable, accessible, and high-performance IT infrastructure.

In its central data center, SOK manages approximately 50 physical server computers running the Windows Server® 2003 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems to provide infrastructure services for more than 2,000 users. SOK uses its server network to run infrastructure roles such as the Active Directory® directory service, domain name systems, and certificate authorization, and management tools such as Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007, and products from independent software vendors.

With Hyper-V, instead of purchasing more hardware and wasting those resources most of the time, we can allocate virtual machines dynamically, maintaining high performance on even heavily loaded systems. Petr Grachev Chief Information Officer, SOK

To help keep IT costs down, SOK has relied on less-expensive server hardware, but this has resulted in unacceptable levels of downtime and increased IT management costs. Complicating this situation, SOK deploys a number of Cognos business intelligence and planning servers that are subjected to sporadic workloads. During reporting periods, the servers experience large spikes in usage, but the server capacities are significantly underutilized during most periods.

“We weren’t using resources as effectively as we could, with 90 percent of our servers underutilizing their capacity while some were significantly overloaded,” says Petr Grachev, Chief Information Officer at SOK. “Also, our multiple hardware systems were not reliable enough, creating too much downtime and high management costs.”

Though SOK was providing effective information services for the enterprise, the company understood that it needed a more reliable hardware environment. SOK wanted an IT infrastructure that could efficiently allocate resources to respond quickly and effectively when the company initiated a new venture, integrated business units, or needed to react to changing opportunities in Russia’s  dynamic markets.

To operate more efficiently, SOK needed to simplify the deployment of new services to avoid having to constantly install and de-install hardware. The company also wanted to simplify its IT management processes and accelerate server provisioning while providing its internal business users with high availability and performance. “Our enterprise faces constantly changing challenges and opportunities,” says Grachev. “We needed a dynamic infrastructure that could give us the flexibility to unlock new capabilities to meet our business and IT needs.”

Solution

SOK recognized that virtualization technology could help the business move toward the optimized IT infrastructure it wanted. The company already had virtualized some of its infrastructure servers using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, which had made it possible to consolidate workloads while enhancing the availability of applications and services. Ready to take virtualization to the next level, in 2007, SOK participated in a Microsoft Technology Adoption Program for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization technology and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

The IT management team at SOK was interested in Hyper-V because it offered opportunities to virtualize demanding workloads and further reduce infrastructure costs through server consolidation while integrating easily with SOK’s existing technology infrastructure. SOK used Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy and manage 30 virtual machines on 10 physical IBM 3850 M2 servers.

Taking advantage of capabilities in Hyper-V such as native high-availability support, x64-bit memory support, and delegated virtual machine management, SOK migrated Web servers, directory and authentication services, LOB applications, Terminal Services, file and print servers, and other network infrastructure servers into a virtual machine environment. By virtualizing Terminal Services, SOK can easily move workloads from workstations to servers with more processing power and optimize control over the deployment and usage of all its LOB applications. The company also migrated its Cognos 8 business intelligence servers into the virtual environment, to provide greater flexibility for managing those dynamic workloads and better utilize server resources.

With this virtualization scenario, SOK can eliminate time-consuming reboots while avoiding mismatches between a backed up System State and new hardware, making backup and disaster recovery easier and more straightforward. To recover a down machine, administrators simply use Hyper-V to copy and attach a virtual hard drive from backup.

SOK uses Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage the virtualization environment, convert physical servers to virtual machines, consolidate the view of its entire virtualized infrastructure, and unify the management of virtual machines and physical servers through a single view. Developers can use rapid provisioning capabilities and the Self Service Provisioning Portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deploy new virtual machines quickly and easily without having to rely on and wait for IT support.

“With Virtual Machine Manager, we’ve been able to streamline and automate the ongoing management of the virtual environment and ease the deployment of new machines,” says Grachev. “By using Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager together, we’ve improved resource utilization, decreased downtime, enhanced our disaster recovery capabilities, and can address changing business needs much faster.”

By 2009, SOK anticipates hosting up to 300 virtual machines on 60 physical servers. According to SOK, the use of IBM and Intel hardware will help SOK realize its virtualization goals. “We chose IBM servers for their extensive scalability, and Intel component–based processors provide broad availability and minimal delivery delays,” says Grachev.

Benefits

By deploying Hyper-V virtualization technology and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, SOK has consolidated and optimized its technology infrastructure, enhancing the reliability, scalability, and flexibility of its server environment while reducing hardware costs. SOK can now dynamically allocate server resources between services while minimizing networking challenges and avoiding downtime. With virtualization, SOK has established the agility it needs to respond rapidly to constantly changing business opportunities.

More Flexible Infrastructure

With virtualization, SOK can invest in fewer, but higher quality and more reliable servers, which reduces hardware costs while increasing the dependability of the server environment. Administrators are able to quickly and easily isolate applications on demand, and allocate resources based on business needs or observed technical problems. Using Hyper-V, SOK has also reduced the time it takes to replace nonfunctional machines.

By using Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager together, we’ve improved resource utilization, decreased downtime, enhanced our disaster recovery capabilities, and can address changing business needs much faster. Petr Grachev Chief Information Officer, SOK

“Administrators no longer have to spend time looking for available hardware to deploy a new machine, or perform constant checks on dozens of different platforms,” says Grachev. “And developers are much freer to conduct experiments. If they have a question, they can use Hyper-V to easily develop a model using a virtual machine.”

Improved Provisioning

With rapid provisioning capabilities and the Self Service Provisioning Portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, developers at SOK have reduced the time it takes to deploy new servers from one day to one hour. With each SOK developer deploying an average of 10 new servers per month, the time savings will be significant,

In addition, developers can provision new machines without having to request new hardware or rely on IT support, streamlining the entire process. Administrators and developers can create high-availability server clusters or even redeploy a corrupted machine in as little as half an hour.

Enhanced Resource Utilization

By continually reallocating virtual machine resources between applications, SOK is now avoiding situations wherein most of its servers are being underutilized while some services are starved of server capacity. SOK was running many servers at less than 10 percent of their processing capacity, but has used virtualization to consolidate a number of infrastructure services into two servers with 60 percent CPU utilization.

With enhanced server utilization, more efficient networking, and minimized downtime, SOK can reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) in server hardware. “With Hyper-V, instead of purchasing more hardware and wasting those resources most of the time, we can allocate virtual machines dynamically, maintaining high performance on even heavily loaded systems,” says  Grachev.

Reduced Costs

By using Hyper-V virtualization technology to consolidate its server environment by as much as 80 percent, SOK anticipates realizing significant savings in hardware costs. At the same time, SOK can use more powerful and reliable physical servers, which will reduce downtime and help minimize TCO in its IT infrastructure. With reduced downtime, faster server provisioning, and more efficient infrastructure management, SOK estimates that it will cut IT labor costs by approximately 30 percent.

Better Business Agility

One overall impact of SOK’s successful deployment of virtualization has been enhanced agility in meeting business opportunities. By cutting down on infrastructure support effort, reducing downtime, providing high availability, and accelerating application deployment, SOK has freed IT to meet the company’s rapidly changing needs.

“First, we used virtualization to increase the reliability and scalability of our infrastructure by consolidating our server environment into a few high-end machines,” says  Grachev “Then, by significantly reducing the time it takes to urgently deploy services, we achieved the flexibility we need to meet business opportunities as they arise.”

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 SOK Group products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.sok.ru