4-page Case Study - Posted 12/1/2008
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Hosting Company Expands Services, Ensures Uptime, and Slashes Costs with Virtualization
Santa Barbara Web Hosting (SBWH) provides enterprise-class managed services to nearly 4,000 small and medium-sized customers. Like many hosting providers, SBWH was challenged with rising power costs, limited resources, and long build times. The company, which was in danger of having to turn away new customers, or losing existing contracts, because it couldn’t access enough affordable power fast enough, sought an efficient way to manage servers for a growing customer base while ensuring reliable, cost-effective offerings. Using Microsoft® solutions, including Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V™ and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the company is now realizing an average annual operational savings of U.S.$315,000, and can offer customers more expansive services at a lower monthly fee, ensure high availability, and provision new servers in just minutes.
Situation
Santa Barbara Web Hosting (SBWH) was founded in 1997 as a hosting company for Windows®-based Web and e-mail applications. Today, it supplies enterprise-class managed services to nearly 4,000 small and medium-sized customers. The company has 250 HP ProLiant Blade Servers in two data centers, which are located in Santa Barbara, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada. The Las Vegas facility is dedicated to high-availability capabilities and was chosen because it is in an area isolated from natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. SBWH now offers traditional hosting services such as shared and dedicated leased servers, as well as Software as a Service—with hosted Microsoft® Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server-based, and customer relationship management (CRM) applications—as well as disaster recovery/business continuity services.
“Our customers rely on our services in order to run their businesses,” says David Straede, President and Chief Operating Officer of SBWH. “They need to be able to consume our services at an affordable price, and they need us to provide a reliable infrastructure. In the end, uptime is really critical to them.”
Like many hosting providers, SBWH was challenged with rising costs, limited resources, and elongated build times. If a customer needed a new server, it could take four hours for the company to provision the hardware and build the solution. Often, customers didn’t want to, or couldn’t, wait that long, putting pressure on SBWH to come up with a way to expedite the process. “Physical upgrades were technical hurdles,” says Steve Antoniuk, a Systems Administrator for SBWH. “If the customer was on our legacy hardware and needed more RAM or CPUs, often the hardware would already be maxed out. Providing the customer with more capacity required a new box and reinstallation of their software, which resulted in downtime that neither we, nor our customers, wanted.”
Power was also becoming a huge obstacle. According to Straede, “Virtually all data centers today are power constrained, and that is the case with the Las Vegas facility we use. While it has physical room for expansion, it is running out of power. In the past, when we signed on new customers, we could simply plug in new servers, but that is quickly becoming impossible. We were in danger of having to turn away new customers, or losing existing contracts, because we couldn’t access enough power for more servers fast enough.”
SBWH is moving to a new 400,000-square -foot facility in Las Vegas that can provide more power per square foot than any facility in the world, but even when power is more readily available, high power prices will continue to make it challenging to provide competitively priced solutions. As Straede explains, “The cost of a dedicated physical server is often more than a small business can afford.”
”We knew the power was going to remain an issue, not necessarily because of capacity but because of price, and we knew that virtualization could help us solve this problem by consolidating servers and using less power. Virtualization would also enable us to more quickly provision services for our customers,” Straede says.
Solution
With its operations already Windows-based, SBWH started its virtualization initiative by using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. Then, as soon as Windows Server 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology became available, the company began evaluating the prerelease version of that product.
SBWH chose Windows Server 2008 Datacenter primarily because it allows for unlimited virtual guests per license, which is important for enabling expansion. “We found that our sweet spot is at least 15 guests on our standard configuration, and we can do this affordably with the Datacenter edition. It also lets us run any version of the Windows operating system as a guest, including Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 Enterprise,” notes Antoniuk.
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With Microsoft virtualization technology, we can offer more expansive capabilities at a lower monthly fee for our customers, which is great for our business. |
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David Straede, President and Chief Operating Officer, Santa Barbara Web Hosting |
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“We were so pleased with the Hyper-V performance that, within a few weeks of testing it, we migrated all of our Virtual Server customers to the Hyper-V prerelease version,” Antoniuk continues. The company ran its production servers on Hyper-V Release Candidate 1 as early as September 2007. When the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version became available in June 2008, Santa Barbara Web Hosting began using that version. Santa Barbara has been hosting production Hyper-V servers for more than six months.
“It took me about one hour to learn Hyper-V,” Antoniuk continues. “Hyper-V is extremely easy to set up and very stable. It is light years ahead of VMware ESX. Even someone who is not that familiar with Windows could easily begin using Hyper-V.” One of SBWH’s customers—a university—is a prime example of this.
This university wanted Santa Barbara Web Hosting to replicate 20 servers that it had in its California facility to the Las Vegas data center. Because of the university’s funding challenges, however, it was a long sales process. By the time the university was ready to move to the contract stage, SBWH’s power costs had escalated, and the company could no longer offer the same disaster recovery solution at the originally quoted price.
“To solve the problem, we suggested using virtualization, which would reduce the hardware this customer needed from 20 to 4 servers. The customer had some experience with ESX, and we had just deployed several Hyper-V servers with great results, so we did a cost analysis of VMware ESX and Hyper-V,” Straede says. “The ESX solution would have cost $30,000 for four servers. With Microsoft, we have a service provider agreement that allows for monthly payments with no capital costs—costing us less than $1,000 over the life of the contract. In the end, with Hyper-V, we were able to offer the customer a robust, virtualization-based solution at our original price quote. And, because Hyper-V is easy to learn, the customer was able to quickly get up to speed on the solution.”
Straede is considered a subject matter expert on Hyper-V and ESX, and is often called upon by prospects and colleagues to help them compare the two products. According to Straede, “Hyper-V has the core features businesses need. It’s the Windows people know, is installed just like other Windows-based applications, and works in a management console that IT staff are already using. The ESX feature set simply doesn’t justify its additional expense.”
In addition to evaluating and acquiring Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, SBWH was eager to test Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for its physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion capabilities. “Virtual Server 2005 offered P2V migration, but we needed a more reliable, simple solution,” Antoniuk says. SBWH evaluated a P2V offering from HP, but didn’t find it compelling. “The day Microsoft posted System Center Virtual Machine Manager on its beta Connect Web site, we downloaded it and did our first P2V migration. It was very easy to use, and we had a 100 percent success rate,” he says.
When System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 was released to manufacturing, SBWH set up host clusters to provide highly available virtual machines. “System Center Virtual Machine Manager allows us to quickly move virtual machines for maintenance, and it automatically moves them if we have a hardware failure. Customers have more uptime, and it’s been a big hit,” Straede says.
SBWH now connects nearly all its servers through the Microsoft Active Directory® directory service. The company provides enterprise tools to customers that have anywhere from 1 to 20 servers, something rarely seen in a hosted environment. The company is able to do this not only because of Hyper-V and Active Directory, but also because it is using Microsoft System Management Suite Enterprise: System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 for backups, System Center Operations Manager 2007 for monitoring and adjusting server loads, System Center Configuration Manager 2007 for deployment, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. By purchasing System Management Suite Enterprise, SBWH saves approximately U.S. $100,000 per year in licensing costs. SBWH uses Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services to enhance remote access to hosted applications by its customers. “Our expertise with Microsoft solutions, and our use of these virtualization and management technologies, enables us to provide enterprise-class solutions for the small and medium-sized business market,” Straede says.
Benefits
Using Microsoft solutions, SBWH created an agile infrastructure that enables it to rapidly and cost-effectively expand its business.
Consolidated Servers Save Power, Reduce Costs
SBWH was able to achieve a 15:1 server consolidation rate. The company has 12 Hyper-V-based host servers running as many as 15 virtual machines each. Each virtual server costs Santa Barbara an average of $42.49 per month, compared to $188.00 per month for a non-virtualized physical server. This figure includes capital costs for the racks, as well as software, physical space, and power. The power costs have been reduced from $6,000 per month to just $780 per month. The virtual server cost also includes the savings of $900 per month in licensing that SBWH realizes by using Windows Server 2008 Datacenter, instead of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise. At its current size, SBWH expects to realize an average annual savings of $315,000 in operational costs. “With Microsoft virtualization technology, we can offer more expansive capabilities at a lower monthly fee for our customers, which is great for our business,” Straede notes.
High Availability of Services
Business continuity is critical to SBWH’s customers, and the company is now confident that it can meet its service level agreements (SLAs). With the failover clustering capabilities in Windows Server 2008, combined with easy management using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, the company can offer 99.999 percent uptime. “In the past, we had a single point of failure, but now, if one server fails, we’ll automatically move the load to another server in the cluster. Instead of having to dispatch a technician to fix a failed box, which could take an hour, we can get everything back up and running in under three minutes,” says Antoniuk.
Quick Provisioning of New Servers, Upgrades
“Our business is all about being competitive,” Straede says. “With virtualization, we can provision a server in minutes—it’s really that simple—and offer the server at a reasonable price.” One of the key features for enabling this is the System Center Virtual Machine Manager library, which SBWH can use to centrally store and manage images for deploying as virtual servers across hosts. By storing images in one central repository rather than on each host, SBWH saves a lot of disk drive space.
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Hyper-V is extremely easy to set up and very stable. It is light years ahead of VMware ESX. Even someone who is not that familiar with Windows could easily begin using Hyper-V. |
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Steve Antoniuk, Systems Administrator, Santa Barbara Web Hosting |
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“As a hosting provider, you can never have enough drive space,” Straede explains. “Having 100 gigabytes of storage in one place instead of needing 100 gigabytes on each server gives us huge savings.”
SBWH can also perform upgrades much more easily and with minimal downtime for customers. Instead of having to upgrade legacy boxes and reinstall the customer’s software, as was required in the past, SBWH can use System Center Virtual Machine Manager P2V capabilities to quickly migrate the customer to a virtual machine—with more RAM and CPUs—keeping all of the applications and settings intact, and without losing any time on reinstallation procedures.
Flexible Hosting Capabilities
“We’ve been impressed that, with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, we can host just about any offering of Windows and virtually any applications. We haven’t found anything we can’t virtualize,” Antoniuk says. “We can confidently virtualize something as essential as our Active Directory servers because Hyper-V is so stable.” In addition to Active Directory, SBWH has virtualized its external domain name system (DNS) servers, its entire CRM platform, monitoring systems, Microsoft Forefront™ Client Security servers, and many of its Web server workloads.
Improved Customer Offerings
SBWH is also using Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services, in parallel with Hyper-V, to free up servers that reside at its customers’ sites. “Many of our customers want to get rid of the servers in their offices that are used for things such as accounting software and file servers. A lot of them also have mobile workforces who need to access applications from the road, and they prefer Web access,” Straede explains. “With Windows Server 2003, moving their workloads to our servers and enabling all their business applications to work seamlessly from anywhere required expensive third-party software. But Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services works out of the box without us hiring a consultant to setup application hosting.”
Straede notes that Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services offers “a great Web launch capability, and now customers can have line of business applications, Microsoft Office Outlook®, Microsoft Office Word, and many other applications on the servers in our data centers. Our customers’ users can easily and seamlessly access them from anywhere by clicking on the icons we provide.”
“Our focus on using Microsoft products is a key reason for our success. The solutions are powerful, easy to use, and enable us to offer great hosting services at competitive prices,” Straede adds.
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 Santa Barbara Web Hosting services, call (805) 692-6900 or visit the Web site at:
www.sbwh.com
