Cloud computing in Montpellier doubles learning power at IBM

The IBM Systems and Technology Group Product and Solutions Support Center (PSSC) in Montpellier provides a vast range of pre-sales and post-sales support activities, requiring a large physical infrastructure. This infrastructure enables the PSSC to offer demonstrations, prototyping, benchmarking, testing and hands-on education services. The activities cover all the IBM operating systems, server platforms and storage devices, combined with middleware and unique network topologies.

In the past, every customer support activity required physical connections to dedicated and customized local servers. Locating, preparing and configuring these servers and the associated storage, network, operating system and applications required significant time and effort. Typically, it could take a week or more to create the required services, during which time all the allocated systems were unavailable for other support projects. This enforced downtime meant that the Montpellier site needed significant additional hardware resources to ensure that enough systems were available for productive use.

Hands-off provisioning

The Montpellier team realized that by transforming its infrastructure into a cloud computing resource, it could resolve both the configuration downtime and the shared resources challenges. Using a combination of IBM Tivoli® Systems Management, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and other control software, the Montpellier Center has created a cloud computing solution that offers IBM System z®, IBM Power Systems™, IBM System x® and IBM System Storage™ resources through a single Web portal.

Server allocation and configuration using the cloud computing approach now typically takes a matter of hours, and does not require manual intervention. The initial pilot has been deployed to all Montpellier-supported benchmark platforms. The service, called Light Benchmark and Testing, allows users to commit to performance or functional testing activities—each of which will have specific resource requirements—and receive confirmation of start date and availability within a few minutes. Behind the scenes, the cloud management stack automatically locates the required servers, ensures that they are available for the project period, makes the reservation, and invokes an automated configuration process.

The reduction in configuration time has increased system utilization at the Montpellier Center, increasing its capacity without requiring additional infrastructure investments. The solution also enabled a reduction in project infrastructure costs, making it possible to run benchmarking for smaller opportunities, increasing revenues for IBM.

Efficient investment in shared resources

Once the cloud solution proved its efficiency on benchmarking and testing services, the next move was to apply it to hands-on education platforms for IBM Systems and Technology Group (STG) classes, where it moved up a gear. At that time, STG had several regional centers across Europe, with IBM hardware running hands-on labs for customer education classes. IBM chose to consolidate all its hands-on training services for Europe to IBM Montpellier, moving existing servers to the location and adding them to the cloud. This created a new service called Central Lab Platform (CLP). These systems add further capacity that can be used on an as-needed basis, delivering very high system utilization rates and zero additional administrative overhead.

Yann Guerin, Lead Architect on IT Optimization and Cloud Computing Solutions at Montpellier, comments, “For each course lab we know how many virtual machines, virtual LANs, what SAN types and capacities are needed. The course module declares those requirements to the cloud, which automatically prepares them for the specified duration. When the course is complete, the resources are released back to the pool.”

With the cloud computing solution in action, smaller IBM locations unable to provide connections to local physical machines were able instead connect to the shared resources at Montpellier—reducing capital expenditure on local infrastructure and focusing investment more efficiently on the shared central infrastructure. Locations not using a cloud computing approach were, by comparison, relatively inefficient users of their physical infrastructure. This encouraged IBM to extend the consolidation exercise and the cloud to support all worldwide STG hands-on classes. “Using the cloud computing approach, we have seen total course operation costs decline, and when the integration of all systems to the Montpellier Center is complete, we predict a 40 percent saving,” says Yann Guerin.

Transforming the user experience

Alongside the operational savings and improved resource availability, the cloud computing approach has also improved the experience for course organizers, who can more easily manage the process of setting up a course through the Web portal.

“In the past, users had to formalize their requests in specific technical terms,” explains Alan Gabellier, Montpellier Education Central Lab Platform Manager. “Now, they just log on to the portal and select a service: ‘Course X for two weeks,’ without any technical jargon. The CLP service translates this request into the necessary infrastructure. Cloud computing has transformed the experience into a service that we provide for the Montpellier Center. In the process we use approximately half the hardware resources previously required, which cuts our building, environmental and administration cost into the bargain.”

Leveraging its cloud services experience in testing and education, the PSSC has built a cloud data center showcase in Montpellier to demonstrate the advantages of cloud computing to customers. Service orientation and cloud benefits are highlighted together with the importance of service automation and dynamic infrastructure.

Yann Guerin adds, “Users of the Montpellier Center service also experience the cloud computing model first hand, and see how it applies across all the IBM server platforms. It shows customers how cloud computing can reduce their costs and increase their resource utilization.”

Packaging the solution

The PSSC clouds will soon be migrated to the new IBM service automation solution (IBM Tivoli Service Automation Manager). The cloud data center showcase also demonstrates the IBM offering that customers can buy to jumpstart their cloud implementation: IBM CloudBurst™. IBM CloudBurst includes IBM BladeCenter® hardware, service management software, storage, networking and services to provide a highly secure, reliable, private cloud computing environment, designed to reduce capital and operational costs.

Alain Gabellier concludes, “We are studying ways to increase the interoperability between the learning and benchmarking cloud services, which have similar capacity constraints. The next steps for Montpellier will be to extend the cloud to unite the two divisions, taking advantage of the resource flexibility that only cloud can truly deliver.”