Redstone enables sixty-fold capacity increase without expanding footprint

Redstone specializes in managed, hosted and internet service provision to a wide range of UK organizations. Redstone employs more than 600 staff, generates more than £100 million in annual revenues, and operates from multiple UK and international locations and over ten data centers.

As Redstone continued to win more and more contracts, its data centers were rapidly filling up. The company’s traditional approach of dedicating each physical server to a specific customer or workload was predictably linear, and the relentless progress towards a full data center was significantly constraining Redstone’s ability to sell new contracts.

John Roberts, Head of Managed Services at Redstone, comments, “We run many UK data centers, and with long-term contracts in place and business volumes growing, we could see where we were heading. We knew that the ability to meet the demand for cloud-based services would be essential, yet the increase in capacity could not easily be met or sustained by our existing solutions. We wanted to transform our own infrastructure to provide cloud services to our customers, increase the flexibility and granularity of our offerings, and simultaneously increase the available capacity in our data centers.”

Redstone spoke with Gartner and reviewed multiple vendor options, assessing service, technical capabilities and corporate strength. Based on a 360-degree view of the offerings, Redstone selected IBM Flex System as the foundation for its transformed service infrastructure.

John Roberts continues, “IBM Flex System technology made sense to Redstone. With close to 1,000 core clients in multiple business sectors, we support every possible type of customer configuration, service or request. IBM Flex System enables Redstone to meet customer requests for different operating systems, capacities and capabilities, and go out to market with sophisticated cloud-enabled offerings based on a secure, sophisticated and mature technology foundation.

“For example, we find that customers not only want IT infrastructure as a cloud service, they want operating systems and software applications as a service – even disaster recovery as a service. IBM Flex System gives Redstone the ability to sell these services and, critically, in a manner that offers scalability as demand rises.”

Using a combination of the IBM Flex System and virtualization technologies from VMware, Redstone has transformed its data centers. Each rack contains four fully populated IBM Flex System Enterprise Chassis, which can contain a total of 56 physical compute nodes, usually assigned individually to customers. The blades can support a wide range of Linux, Microsoft Windows, and IBM AIX® and IBM i operating systems, enabling Redstone to meet specific client requests as well as deploying standardized services. By deploying up to 60 virtual servers on each blade, Redstone is able to support more than 3,000 servers per rack, transforming the capacity of each data center.

Frank Smith, Business Development Manager, comments, “IBM Flex System allows us to scale up very rapidly as customer demand and workload rises. In the past, specifying, procuring and deploying a new server might have taken up to six weeks. Rather than having to commit to rip-and-replace programs to meet rising demand, with IBM Flex System Redstone has the ability to extend existing systems easily and in minutes. The fully integrated networking and system management services mean that we can create a new virtual server in less than a minute, matching supply and demand in a way that was not previously possible.”

IBM Flex System offers up to twice the application density in the same floor space, energy cost reductions of up to 40 percent, and reduced software licensing costs with up to 70 percent fewer cores needed than previous-generation systems. Redstone has multiplied these benefits by hosting multiple servers on each physical system, optimizing each server’s configuration to meet their customers' application requirements.

Additionally, IBM Flex System integrated management capabilities help to reduce administration costs by up to 50 percent, and cut system set-up costs by 66 percent.

Frank Smith comments, “From a Managed Service Provider perspective the technical and cost benefits are only part of the story. Our customers entrust Redstone with business-critical applications and services, and their executive boards must be totally confident of Redstone’s capabilities. As part of their due diligence before placing a contract, our customers want to know how we deliver on our contractual Service Level Agreements. IBM is a globally recognized, established technology leader, and provides our customers with the assurance that Redstone is the right managed service provider choice.”

The shift to cloud-enabled technologies represents a strategic shift for Redstone. Customers that might have been nervous about a shared service provision take a very different attitude to cloud, and are hungry to outsource and out-task, creating significant new demand.

John Roberts concludes, “IBM Flex System is helping us to prove to our customers that they can successfully manage business risk by using cloud services. Redstone’s outstanding track record combined with the strength of the IBM brand helps to build credibility, reduce business risk and open up new market opportunities.

“Ultimately, the aim is to offer customers what they want, rapidly and at commercially attractive rates. IBM Flex System provides the scalability, flexibility and reliability to make that proposition possible.”