CDW adds hybrid cloud flexibility and saves time while cutting costs with Azure Local

Starting the search for a new virtualization platform

CDW has evolved from its origins as an entrepreneurial desktop hardware supplier, now globally recognized as a Fortune 500 multi-brand IT solutions and service provider that embraces emerging trends within the technology space. Backed by 40 years of industry expertise, extensive brand relationships, and early adoption of virtualization and Kubernetes, the company has a strong, award-winning team ready to help companies design, implement and manage a wide variety of technology services. “All the technologies and tools that my IT colleagues and I focus on for ourselves are also technologies that our customers seek,” says Justin Smith, Director of Platform Engineering at CDW.

With a cloud-first technology strategy driving the organization’s internal approach, CDW also recognizes that some products, , workloads, or entire corporate IT systems might work better in or demand an on-premises solution. For example, latency-heavy applications that require proximity to an on-site solution might not make sense to move to the cloud to maintain cost and functionality. Additionally, industry-specific tools like programmable logic controllers have sensitivities down to the millisecond and also might not be suited for a public cloud. 

While Mr. Smith and his Technology colleagues constantly reevaluate what sits where, they wanted to optimize CDW’s hybrid datacenter to manage on-premises and hybrid workloads more efficiently. In turn, they sought to diversify the company’s virtualization platform solutions, helping them reach beyond existing capabilities, and enhance on-premises infrastructure to better and serve customers and support internal operations. In doing so, they planned to evaluate each potential solution on where it resides in the market and whether it’s going to be heavily invested in going forward. “One of the benefits of being CDW is that we’re well positioned to understand customer needs, trends and purchasing behaviors giving us very interesting insights into technology that relates to our strategy and roadmap,” says Mr. Smith.

Checking all the boxes with a solution that offers new capabilities and improved performance

CDW approaches technology infrastructure diversification as not just being able to bring additional functionalities to its teams, but also introducing different answers to questions about how business and IT problems can be solved. When whispers of Azure Local, an on-premises Microsoft Azure solution, hit the market, CDW recognized an exciting opportunity in support of that vision with new capabilities related to distributed infrastructure and virtualization. It also complemented its use of Azure Kubernetes Service for containerization, Azure SQL Managed Instance for database services, and Azure ExpressRoute to bridge its geographical facilities. CDW expressed interest in Azure Local to the services team for its existing HPE GreenLake solution, who then co-championed its rollout across the company. “HPE suggested piloting Azure Local, and very quickly, we were having conversations with Microsoft and HPE, seeing the potential benefits, receiving equipment, and ultimately starting our Azure on-premises journey,” says Mr. Smith. 

“We follow a running theme of what we call the 3 Hs: hyperconverged, hybrid cloud, and hypervisor alternative,” explains Chris Monroe, Head Architect for Platform Engineering at CDW. “Our decision to use Azure Local hit all three checkboxes in a way that aligned with our other investments.” Monroe and Smith were particularly interested in being able to swiftly migrate on-premises workloads to the cloud and move them back on-premises with the Azure Arc resource bridge, driving flexibility now and into the future. They were also empowered to start bringing hyperconverged infrastructure solutions into their datacenter and have used that diversification to help with cost management avoiding costs up to $3M

Better yet, the timing lined up perfectly with the company’s regularly scheduled compute and software refresh and goal to boost business continuity and recoverability. “Bringing an alternative hypervisor on deck and simultaneously moving toward a single pane of glass and management made a lot of sense for us,” says Mr. Smith.

The decision to go with Azure Local and the Microsoft adaptive cloud model was ultimately driven by the need for an efficient and seamlessly managed hybrid datacenter that can host workloads where they make the most sense—on-premises or in the cloud—and meet the most ambitious of metrics. “Our goal was to move all non-production workloads, including more than 800 virtual machines, to Azure Local within four months, and we did it,” says Mr. Monroe. 

Along the way, staff measured disk input/output (I/O) performance of the company’s virtual machines (VMs) and observed that performance now met or exceeded that of past infrastructure. In particular, SQL instances running on Azure Local demonstrated almost doubled performance compared with traditional instances. Additionally, the 25-gigabit backplane offered by Azure Local nodes provided a significant improvement in network performance, further enhancing the overall user experience and perception of the new environment.

Raising the bar for on-premises development, datacenter rollouts, and time to market

Bringing together all its cloud and hybrid infrastructure, CDW is firmly positioned to better support customers and innovate, build, manage, and accelerate its mission. “When thinking about development, pipelines, and runways, our new approach extends the capabilities to now have some of our Azure pipelines on-premises,” says Mr. Smith. “A developer or an app owner can sandbox on-premises, test things out, make sure they have the integration and naming right, containerize it there, and then package it up and run it through the pipeline to get it deployed into Azure. This is great functionality.”

In the case of a recent new market launch, CDW took advantage of the opportunity to deploy a small, three-node Azure Local cluster, and unlike previous site and datacenter rollouts, went live within a week with a platform delivered ahead of schedule. “We were spinning up domain controllers within 48 hours of our HPE GreenLake engineer handing them off to us,” says Mr. Monroe. “It was impressive and demonstrated how efficiently we can roll out a new data center.”

The biggest benefit has been that most CDW coworkers don’t see a change. “It goes back to workloads running where they should,” says Mr. Smith. “If you’re developing or containerizing on-premises and don’t see a difference between that and running it directly in Azure, it’s a big win. All the localization and other issues you might typically encounter when setting up a deployment have already been solved. It speeds up time to market with the capability to have a stronger release candidate out of the gate without having to come back and tweak or fine-tune.”

“A low-cost, high-value approach to virtualization”

Diversifying its hypervisor landscape with Azure Local is helping CDW reduce its dependencies and comes with a significant financial benefit, more than halving its renewal costs. “It absolutely provided a cost-effective, high-value approach to virtualization,” adds Mr. Smith. The company continues to see workloads run faster on hyperconverged infrastructure on Azure and will soon start moving production-level applications into Azure Local. “The other cool thing that we’re looking at specifically because of the resource bridge functionality is Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Local,” says Mr. Smith. “If we have a team needing a latency-heavy application for two or three months of the year, we can fold virtual desktops back up into the cloud after they’re done using that application. And due to our Azure usage, having the desktops be parallel to everything else makes a whole lot of sense.”

IT staff and platform engineers are eager to embrace upcoming product enhancements that will round out their existing capabilities. “There’s already been a significant number of improvements added quickly with releases, which has been very positive,” notes Mr. Monroe. “Every time I fire up Windows Admin Center or talk to our managed services folks, there’s a new version of something, and we appreciate the momentum.” Adds Mr. Smith, “CDW’s existing relationship with Microsoft makes us a valued, trusted company to deliver Azure Local to other customers because we can say we’re running it, and we look forward to the road ahead.”            

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