Lionbridge

Globalization Company Standardizes, Cuts Costs, Enhances Security with Virtualization

Lionbridge Technologies provides globalization, development, and testing services for enterprise applications and IT systems. A public company with U.S.$452 million in revenue, it handles complex translation, testing, and development projects that are shared among multiple sites. Lionbridge needed to centralize and streamline its process and create a more flexible, cost-effective, and secure way to build and manage its testing environments. It now uses Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V™ technology and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to create a Virtual Cloud Lab. To help enable secure global access, it also uses Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services. Lionbridge reduced hardware costs by 80 percent for its virtual LAB environment, standardized its testing environments, accelerated machine provisioning, and enhanced security and business continuity.

 

Situation

Lionbridge Technologies is renowned for world-class globalization, development, and testing services. A public company with U.S.$452 million in revenue, Lionbridge has offices in 26 countries, more than 4,600 employees, and a network of 25,000 independent translation partners. The company is distinguished for quality and reliability, as evidenced by having earned the Microsoft Vendor of the Year award and ranked as “#1 Outsourced Testing and Quality Assurance Provider” by the Black Book of Outsourcing.  

Globalization, or localized translation, represents the majority of Lionbridge’s operations, accounting for 65 percent of its business. Testing services make up another 15 percent of the company. The testing of globalization projects is a critical aspect of the company’s business and its success. “It’s very complicated and there are a lot of moving components,” says Oyvind Kaldestad, Vice President of Corporate IT for Lionbridge Technologies. “To ensure accuracy and timeliness, we must have efficient, standardized processes for configuring the software that enables this testing, which takes place in multiple sites around the world.”

Lionbridge had to overcome several challenges to make this happen, including managing isolated, geographically dispersed testing environments. For instance, it is common for a project requiring translation in 10 languages to be dispersed among multiple offices. “Each site works largely independently, partly because of time zone differences but also because each customer has different requirements,” explains Damian Flynn, Solutions Architect of Corporate IT Applications for Lionbridge Technologies. This meant that each office set up its own testing environment, including determining the best way to install the software, which operating system to run, and other configuration requirements. “Because the projects adapted to customers' specific needs and were not controlled by IT staff in a uniformed way, the different locations weren’t necessarily working to the same standards,” Flynn continues.

We created a cost-effective, flexible environment in which users securely access the resources they need from anywhere. Workers can be more productive and efficient, and we can ensure high quality. Oyvind Kaldestad Vice President of Corporate IT, Lionbridge Technologies

When it came to meeting milestones, Lionbridge might find that one location’s testing was on target, while another was experiencing problems. The problems could have been due to glitches in the software, which would then need to be corrected, but they could also have been attributed to differences in installation settings, which led to performance issues. As a result, the project could fall behind. “When you have multiple sites working on the same project, you also have to be concerned about network issues,” adds Sebastien Lario, Systems Engineer for Lionbridge Technologies. “If one site’s network connection went down at a critical point, the engineers wouldn’t be able to deliver their portion of the project.”

In addition, the sites often had different levels of security, and IT employees were reticent to provide access to the infrastructure outside of the labs’ perimeters—which presented a problem when working with off-site employees and consultants. And because sites working on the same project were often located in countries with different copyright laws, employees had to navigate those laws while trying to complete multisite projects in a standard, timely fashion.

Lionbridge also had to ensure that each site had the appropriate infrastructure to support its particular tests, which often meant acquiring additional resources. “If the sites didn’t have the right equipment, we would have to purchase or lease additional hardware. Unfortunately, this was a common occurrence,” Kaldestad notes. 

Local IT resources were also overly burdened. These IT employees had to provision the support infrastructure and often built out the testing environments, taking them away from their core responsibilities. They also depended on corporate IT staff to help determine and acquire what they needed.

To streamline the process and cut costs, Lionbridge engaged in an initiative to centralize the components required for these projects and minimize the workload for local sites and corporate IT staff.

Solution

In 2007, Lionbridge embarked on what it calls the “Virtual Cloud Lab,” a globally accessible data center that could be shared by engineers in any of the company’s sites, as well as by the extended workforce that is not physically located in Lionbridge offices.

In the project’s early architectural stages, Lionbridge experimented by using Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005. “It was a great starting point because it gave us an indication that we could create a Virtual Cloud Lab that would help us save money and time, but it didn’t have the right management tools,” Flynn says.
 
When Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta version 2 was available, Lionbridge joined the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) so that it could work with Microsoft to determine how to use the self-service and automation capabilities to simplify and improve management of the virtual environment.

Lionbridge also began evaluating Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization technology when it became available. The company purchased the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise operating system featuring Hyper-V primarily for the hypervisor capabilities. “We adopted Hyper-V pretty quickly and began moving our older projects from Virtual Server 2005 to the main Hyper-V servers that run the lab,” Flynn says. 

“We choose to use the Enterprise edition of Windows Server 2008 so that we could easily support the 256GB RAM capacity available to us on our Dell R900 servers,” Flynn adds. “We also plan to combine our Hyper-V hosts into a large cluster and enable the PRO (performance and resource optimization) features in System Center Virtual Machine Manager so that we can further extend the utilization of our hosts, and permit support for more intelligent management and placement while clustered.”

Today, the Virtual Cloud Lab is hosted in the main Lionbridge data center in Boston, Massachusetts. Lionbridge runs Hyper-V on nine Dell R900 host servers—with plans to consolidate to six servers—and uses one instance of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to manage approximately 300 virtual machines. The number of virtual machines varies depending on the company’s project load. As Lionbridge migrates more of its physical lab locations into the Virtual Cloud Lab, it expects the environment, including the number of physical and virtual machines, to grow.

In its Virtual Cloud Lab, Lionbridge has a set of virtual local area networks (VLANs), which each host a specific project to ensure isolation. All of the host Hyper-V systems, as well as the company’s Active Directory® service and Terminal Services environment, are made more secure with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 in a private VLAN.

Lionbridge uses Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol to present virtual machines to users. To maximize security, the Virtual Cloud Lab relies on Terminal Services Gateway, domain name system integration, and a public key infrastructure environment. Terminal Services Web Access enables Lionbridge to provide a dedicated workspace for each user.

The company’s lab administrators and project managers use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to create the initial operating system and application templates needed for each project. When the templates are finalized, project managers use the self-service feature in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to deploy their environments and change them dynamically as required, without any assistance from the corporate IT staff. Each project is tightly managed using the quota-based system in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Benefits

Using Microsoft solutions, Lionbridge has created a standardized testing approach that is much more secure and efficient, lowering the company’s IT costs.

Reduced Hardware Costs by 80 Percent

By centralizing its testing infrastructure in the Virtual Cloud Lab and enabling all workers to access those resources, Lionbridge eliminates the need for in-house IT testing infrastructures. In addition, the company no longer has to augment local offices with additional servers to meet new project needs. The engineers working on a project simply access the centralized resources from their desktops using a Terminal Services connection.

Moving our local labs onto the Hyper-V/Virtual Machine Manager–based cloud platform saves us a tremendous amount of money. It reduces our hardware costs by 80 percent. Oyvind Kaldestad Vice President of Corporate IT, Lionbridge Technologies

“In the cloud, we have a 100 percent virtual footprint, completely removing all physical hardware requirements at the local sites. This amounts to hundreds of servers and desktops that have been replaced with six-node virtual machine hosts in the cloud,” Flynn says. “Additionally, we can now operate projects globally using a follow-the-sun approach, which enables us to triple our resource utilization rates and accelerate client programs.”

Kaldestad adds, “Moving our local labs onto the Hyper-V/Virtual Machine Manager–based cloud platform saves us a tremendous amount of money. It reduces our hardware costs by 80 percent.” By taking the price of a physical server and the required storage, and dividing it by the number of virtual machines the server hosts, Lionbridge calculates that it costs less than $200 to set up a virtual machine. This is based on a fully configured Dell R900 128-gigabyte server that can run 80 to 100 virtual machines.

“Moving to a virtualized environment enabled us to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2008 alone due to reductions in hardware costs, as well as associated power, cooling, and manual labor costs,” Flynn continues.

Created Standard Testing Environments

Lionbridge no longer encounters problems that previously resulted from inconsistent builds when multiple sites were involved in the same test project. All the engineers working on a project share the virtual machines in the cloud, which ensures that they all use the same installation process and the same software stack (including the operating systems and required applications). “Allowing us to keep a baseline standard for deployments is critical because it helps ensure that multisite project results aren’t affected by differences in the testing infrastructure,” Flynn notes.

Accelerated Machine Provisioning and Builds

“Using the self-service portal in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, our engineers can select the template images required for their project and deploy their own virtual machines on demand. This saves massive amounts of time,” says Flynn. In the past, IT employees would have to build a test environment for every language and every lab involved in the project. Now they just install the required software into a template and make it available to team members. “We create the template just once and then we step away. We don’t have to create one for every location because all users can access the same library,” Flynn explains.

According to Flynn, training users on the self-service portal is simple. Typically, users become proficient in just one hour. “Instead of taking up to a day for the local IT team to get an environment up and ready for use, we can now drop a template in less than one hour. Lately, we’ve been averaging less than 20 minutes,” Flynn adds. 

Lionbridge uses the quota capability in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to control the number of virtual machines that a particular project can have hosted in the Virtual Cloud Lab at any one time. Through the self-service portal, the project team engineers are empowered to provision new virtual machines themselves, depending on their remaining quota points. They can also delete a virtual machine or move it from the host to archive in a library in order to release quota points. When needed, they can swap virtual machines back into production on demand. “The quota-based system enables us to ensure that no over-subscription occurs on the hosts, and permits us to plan and enlarge the cloud environment in a careful, effective way,” explains Flynn.

Combining Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 not only eliminates bottlenecks by reducing the project team’s dependency on IT staff; it accelerates delivery to the project team, enabling the engineers to work more productively. This frees up valuable time for IT employees, enabling them to focus on more urgent and strategic projects.

Enabled Flexible Project Teams

The Virtual Cloud Lab enables Lionbridge to provide global access—24 hours a day, seven days to week—to resources that previously were limited to local sites. “We have a much more flexible environment now, and this is critical to our business,” says Kaldestad. “Managers have more flexibility in who they assign to projects. They can use experts who aren’t located in a particular office, and contractors can work securely from their homes at any time of the day or night.”

Enhanced Security, Business Continuity

One of the contributing factors to this agile work arrangement is Lionbridge’s use of the Terminal Services Gateway. “Engineers in any location can securely access the virtual machines in the cloud through an authenticated gateway, without our IT staff needing to make hundreds of holes in our firewall,” Flynn says. Adding large numbers of Internet protocol ports to the firewall access control lists—which is what Lionbridge had to do in the past—compromises security of the entire environment.

Now, Lionbridge doesn’t worry about different levels of security in different offices. The company also eliminated issues that previously arose when trying to adhere to different countries’ copyright laws. “These concerns are eradicated because now we can use our experts in China, for example, while the information they use sits firmly in our data center cloud,” Flynn notes.

Lario adds that using Terminal Services Gateway with Terminal Services RemoteApp® network software also helps with business continuity. “We don’t worry if a network connection at one location goes down because, now, the worker can securely access the same resources from another office or from home using a DSL line,” he says.

“We created a cost-effective, flexible environment in which users securely access the resources they need from anywhere. Workers can be more productive and efficient, and we can ensure high quality,” Kaldestad adds.

Flynn concludes, “Most of the Lionbridge core infrastructure has been migrated to Hyper-V. As we progress, we will continue to investigate other areas of our business that can be virtualized, enabling us to consolidate and empower our resources to an even greater extent.”

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 

 

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For more information about Lionbridge Technologies products and services, call (781) 434-6000 or visit the Web site at:
www.lionbridge.com