Case Study: US State Government Eliminates VM Sprawl

US State Government

Their Challenge

The state IT organization struggled with centralizing a large number of virtualization resources that were spread across separately managed vCenter and XenServer clusters. VM sprawl was costing the state thousands of dollars a month in infrastructure and licensing charges, and delays in resource provisioning resulted in a sharp increase of public cloud-based shadow IT environments that put sensitive agency data and security at risk.

Their Technology

CloudBolt’s Competition

CloudBolt’s Solution

Summary

Eliminate VM Sprawl

CloudBolt’s ability to ingest information about all of the VMs running across the state enabled the IT team to identify high-cost VMs that were being under-utilized. Unneeded VMs were terminated, freeing underlying server resources and software licenses.

Self-service IT reduced shadow IT

Shadow IT refers to unsanctioned IT solutions that grow in reaction to an IT organization’s inability to meet their consumer’s needs. Using CloudBolt to provide a self-service portal that automates the end-to-end provisioning and management of servers helped meet IT consumer’s need to receive on-demand access to servers.

Flexibility to choose configuration management solution

The state IT team wants to move past managing multiple VM templates and manual management of software application installation and configuration. They’re currently evaluating Puppet and Chef. CloudBolt’s integration with many industry-leading technologies gives them the ability to select the configuration manager that is best for their specific use cases.

Chargeback and showback reporting

The state’s previous chargeback reporting required significant staff effort to collect data from multiple systems, correlate it, and then assign it to the appropriate group for invoicing. CloudBolt streamlined this entire process, savings dozens of staff hours each month.

Increased agility and automated testing

Implementing CloudBolt enabled the IT organization to focus on tasks and projects that enabled them to create new offerings for their IT consumers, who can easily select from a list of available offerings from CloudBolt’s service catalog. Through the Continuous Infrastructure Testing (CIT), CloudBolt automatically tests the underlying service offering components to ensure they’re working properly, improving the end user experience.

Customer Findings

The state’s evaluation and selection of CloudBolt was an easy one. Rather than “select the best of the worst”, they continued to search for a cloud manager that was both easy to install and configure, but would also grow with their requirements. Of the evaluated competition, only CloudBolt effectively integrated their existing infrastructure, making it easy to model and apply a rate structure.

The CloudBolt rate engine enabled the state to offer different rates on a per-environment basis. On install, CloudBolt reported a large cost delta between what the customer expected and what CloudBolt actually reported. After a bit of investigation, CloudBolt was deemed to be correct: the IT team discovered several TiB of allocated storage that had been routinely missed from manual chargeback accounting.

CloudBolt’s intuitive interface enabled the state to rapidly develop new offerings for their end users. The state could easily modify the ordering process to match the level of understanding of the end user, meaning the state could expand the self-service IT portal to serve nearly everyone who regularly requested IT resources or applications.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Large Software and Services Company

Employees: 2,000
Annual Revenue: $450M
Location: United States

Their Technology

Virtualization: VMware vCenter, Amazon Web Services
Configuration Management: Chef (multiple instances)
Orchestration: vCloud Orchestrator
Ticketing: ServiceNow
IPAM: InfoBlox
Operating Systems: RHEL, CentOS, Windows
VMs: 7,000+

CloudBolt’s Competition

Their Challenge

Before CloudBolt, the company relied on a complicated integration of vCloud Orchestrator, Chef, and a ticketing system to run their server provisioning processes. They struggled with slow turn-around time, a lack of environment governance, and difficulty understanding the monetary costs of their infrastructure.

CloudBolt’s Solution

Summary

Building a Hybrid Cloud with CloudBolt didn’t mean starting over
Beyond discovering the company’s pre-existing servers, CloudBolt also connected to their Chef installation and automatically imported the available Chef recipes, cookbooks, and roles. The Chef content was then ready to re-use from within CloudBolt as applications that could be added and removed to servers. CloudBolt did the same for their vCloud Orchestrator environment, exposing the flows so that they can be executed manually or automatically at any point during a server’s lifecycle.

Self service IT reduced shadow IT
Shadow IT refers to unsanctioned IT solutions that grow in reaction to an IT organization’s inability to meet their consumer’s needs. Using CloudBolt to provide a self-service portal that automates the end-to-end provisioning and management of servers helped meet IT consumer’s need to receive on-demand access to servers.

Faster turn-around with smart automation and integrations
CloudBolt’s orchestration hooks feature enabled the company to tightly integrate with existing components of their flow. For example, CloudBolt was made to use InfoBlox for IP address management during provisioning and modification of networks. Orchestration hooks also enabled CloudBolt to create ServiceNow tickets when provisioning requests were approved, and to update those tickets as servers are modified or deleted. CloudBolt allows existing infrastructure to be partitioned into “environments” by their hypervisors, networks, applications, OS templates, and more. These environments were exposed to end-users via simple order forms and a unified API that let them request servers and more– without regard to where those resources would be deployed. The time required to provision a single VM was reduced from 1 business day to just 15 minutes. The time to onboarding new hosted clients was reduced from 7 days to under 30 minutes.

Customer satisfaction through better availability
Because the company utilized CloudBolt’s multi-tenant capabilities to expose provisioning capabilities to their hosted customers, it was critical that every step of the process worked perfectly. They used CloudBolt’s Continuous Infrastructure Testing (CIT) to perform end-to-end testing of the entire provisioning process. If a hypervisor or orchestration tool fails, CIT’s early warnings give system administrators the time to proactively address the issue before end-users have a chance to notice a problem.

Improved margin reporting and pricing
Interactive reports of infrastructure usage allowed IT to provide accurate actionable information to business about the cost of resources required to develop various products, which is used to set pricing and report on margins. IT was also able to differentiate high-value external clients from the ones that require more resources than what they are currently paying for.

Customer Findings

✦ Time-to-value — 2.5 days to implement
✦ Simple and powerful solution
✦ Lower OPEX — CloudBolt was less expensive to operate and maintain
✦ Capability — CloudBolt successfully met all 8 use cases out of the box
✦ Flexibility — CloudBolt provided customer with maximum choice
✦ Governance — Unique cost & license tracking unify management visibility
✦ Value — Unique features such as license management and self testing added significant value

During the company’s evaluation of CloudBolt, they were impressed by the speed of implementation. After day one, CloudBolt was integrated with Chef, vCloud Orchestrator, and vCenter. After day 2, all required use cases had been met. Subsequent days were spent delivering nice-to-have integrations with the company’s workflows by using CloudBolt’s upgrade-safe orchestration hooks feature.

Compared to the competition, the customer preferred CloudBolt’s powerful yet intuitive interface and API. The consumable interface meant that CloudBolt would not require significant ongoing maintenance to make changes and alterations as the customer’s needs evolved, and the API meant that devops teams could access IT resources programmatically. The seamless upgrade process was also attractive: CloudBolt is updated just as easily as it is installed, and even demonstrated that customizations were upgrade safe.

Overall, the customer cited a combination of CloudBolt’s capabilities as being both compelling and accessible. Coupled with the superior OpEx, and a time-to-value that was measured in hours, the choice was simple.

Public University and Research Institution

Location: Eastern United States

Their Technology

Virtualization: VMware vCenter
Public Cloud: Amazon Web Services, Acquia Cloud Platform for Drupal
Configuration Management: Puppet, Homegrown Scripts
Operating Systems: RHEL, CentOS, Windows
VMs: 1500+

CloudBolt’s Competition

About the University

The University Office of Information Technology’s cloud team is responsible for fielding and supporting cloud-enabled technologies to faculty, staff, and students. They attempt to support instruction whenever possible.

Their Challenge

The cloud team is tasked to implement various cloud-based services, but was challenged to expose them to students and staff in a controlled and reliable manner. They needed a unified interface that would allow end users to find and request cloud services regardless if the services were provided by a public cloud provider or by existing university assets, and enable tracking and reporting of resource usage to better understand the impact of their work

CloudBolt’s Solution

Summary

Empower educators with surplus IT

With CloudBolt, the university was able to re-purpose surplus capacity from their corporate environments, and put it to use by educators — enabling students to access server and application resources to support their class work.

Customer satisfaction through better availability

As the demand for compute resources in support of Big Data and other compute-intensive workloads increases, faculty and staff are impatient in getting access to additional resources. CloudBolt replaces time-and resource-intensive manual processes by allowing end-users to drive the provisioning and server management process on their own.

End-to-end automation

Automating the routine provisioning and management meant systems administrators could do more with less, increasing the server to administrator ratio. Removing the people from the process also improved compliance, reduced OpEx costs, and significantly increased the pace at which the IT team was able to offer new services.

Cost and utilization transparency

Once CloudBolt imported the customer’s existing environments and servers, the university was able to determine which colleges and departments were using resources. The university was then able to re-assign budgets to better support demonstrated need.

Self-service access to non-traditional resources

Beyond just provisioning VMware and AWS EC2-backed servers, CloudBolt was easily configured to create S3 storage buckets in AWS, as well as provision Drupal accounts in the Acquia Cloud Platform for Drupal.

Multiple authentication points

University faculty and staff authenticate against a different Active Directory endpoint than the student population. CloudBolt’s multi-tenant capabilities ensure that every user is authenticated to the correct environment, and presented with the expected branding when logged in.

Customer Findings

✦ Seamless support of instructional needs
✦ Consolidated shadow IT systems reduces costs
✦ Student environment usage tracking, complete with automatic cleanup at semester’s end
✦ Rapidly integrate unique infrastructure and platforms offerings
✦ Multi-tenant solution unified management of disparate groups’ environments
✦ Provide access to enterprise instructional technology that mimics what students encounter in the career marketplace

CloudBolt’s selection was based on CloudBolt’s unique ability to rapidly integrate with non-traditional service providers. In the University’s case, they needed to make cloud-provided Drupal instances available to end users in an on-demand basis, while still accounting for cost transparency and access rights. While the competition claimed to be able to rapidly do this, CloudBolt was the only tool that was able to demonstrate this capability in the University’s own environment. CloudBolt enabled the University to consolidate shadow IT environments that groups turned to when they were unable to get access to centralized resources in a timely manner. Providing on-demand centralized access, management, and provisioning of IT resources also enabled the University to achieve better economies of scale as they extended their offerings to a larger faculty, staff, and student population. Furthermore, the ability to add elastic public cloud-based resources enabled the cloud team to flexibly account for peaks in demand based on enrollment. Integrated reporting ensured accurate cost accounting.

The cloud team’s use of CloudBolt to provide on-demand IT resources from a variety of managed environments has made them the de-facto IT architecture thought leaders at the University. IT teams such as the Windows group now look toward the cloud team’s offerings as the reference architecture for how to properly implement cloud-based services in varied and disparate environments. Thanks to its selection of CloudBolt, the cloud team has increased their organizational capital.

Consumer Retail Company

Company: Consumer Retail
Employees: 25,000
Annual Revenue: $3.5 billion
Location: United States

Their Technology

Virtualization: VMware vCenter, OpenStack, HP Virtual Connect
Configuration Management: Puppet
Continuous Integration: Jenkins
Orchestration: Rundeck
Ticketing: ServiceNow
IPAM: InfoBlox
Operating Systems: CentOS, Windows, Ubuntu
VMs: 1,800+

CloudBolt’s Competition

Their Challenge

At this company, the IT group primarily services the e-commerce group, which is responsible for the web storefronts of all the corporate brands, and for a significant portion of the company’s revenue. To speed delivery of new and innovative capabilities, the e-commerce team needed a platform that would allow on-demand access to production and development/test resources, with high compliance to PCI and other standards. Initially, they experimented with a homegrown solution based on OpenStack, but this was rejected by the CIO because it failed to effectively take into account needs of other lines of business. The potential for infrastructure fragmentation, extra costs, and large amounts of duplicated work caused this company to search for a better solution.

CloudBolt’s Solution

Summary

Aligned IT with lines of business
CloudBolt enabled the IT team to offer distinct solutions to various lines of business without adding significant OpEx. Increased service to the lines of business ensures the IT team is a partner to success rather than merely a service provider, and ultimately results in more productivity and innovation from all parties.

Expanded configuration management
CloudBolt’s integration with Puppet configuration management made it simple to pair VMware virtualization with Puppet configuration management. Even non-technical users can now use the Puppet resources and applications IT developed because they’re exposed as installable and manageable applications on requested servers. The company now spends less time managing dozens of VM templates, and more time realizing the added value of effective configuration management.

Provided IT flexibility in technology choice
The customer has a fairly large amount of legacy infrastructure in the form of existing VMs, deployed applications, and other stand-alone physical server environments. CloudBolt has become the foundation for a transformative IT process that will enable IT to begin deploying services that can help them retire legacy infrastructure that carries along significant OpEx requirements. CloudBolt also enabled the IT team to reduce their dependence on single-vendor virtualization solutions, saving money, and reducing risk to the business.

Obsoleted their expensive HP CloudSystem Matrix deployment
Even after significant investments in professional services and painful upgrade experiences, HP CloudSystem Matrix was not able to meet this company’s requirement of a user-ready portal. When the company started investigating CloudBolt, they were excited by the contrasts: painless upgrades and a feature-set thoughtfully designed to meet their needs.

More accurate test environments
When working to test new software releases, the e-commerce team had to rely on environments that were not exact replicas of production systems. By using the CloudBolt API, the
e-commerce team enabled their continuous integration environment to use production-replica systems to perform build and functionality tests, which increased productivity, as well as code quality.

Customer Findings

Summary

✦ Rapid time to value — up and running in less than a day
✦ Easy installations, customizations, and upgrades means CloudBolt grows with them
✦ High-value product roadmap will allow further innovation
✦ Immediate delivery of test environments reduced time to deployment by 50%
✦ Compelling price point with low barrier to entry

CloudBolt’s ease of use was one of the customer’s favorite features. A key reviewer of CloudBolt mentioned that they felt more confident with users ordering servers from CloudBolt than with any other system. After struggling to use CloudForms and Cloud360, the reviewer felt that they were not viable portals for end-users and that both required too much expensive customization to meet requirements.

The well rounded feature-set that CloudBolt provided helped them re-unify their infrastructure and allowed them to avoid investing more into their failed HP CloudSystem Matrix deployment by dropping it entirely. This company now has a self-service portal that allows IT to be successful in providing their consumers simple access to needed resources.