Company saves millions with IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance

IBM® WebSphere® Application Server powers the day-to-day operations of many of the largest companies. Many large financial services companies, in particular, are in essence software companies that build their custom applications that create their products on IBM operating systems and IBM middleware.

The result can be WebSphere product environments with hundreds and even thousands of servers that have to be maintained to keep them configured consistently across environments. Provisioning large environments can be labor-intensive, and administrative costs can be pushed upward by the number of steps and decisions involved in designing, installing, configuring and maintaining solutions comprised of different software components.

For example, a major financial services company wanted to consolidate 500 servers across two data centers with 48 blade servers virtualized with VMware. The company needed to be able to respond to its customers by quickly and efficiently building temporary development environments for the holiday sales seasons and taking them down when they were no longer needed. The company also wanted to be able to recreate in one data center its six security zones with complex firewall rules without spending significant man hours on the project.

The company turned to an IBM Business Partner on the forefront of the effort to help customers reduce cost and gain efficiencies in deploying and maintaining their enterprise WebSphere Application Server environments. The Haddon Hill Group (HHG), based in Oakland, California, was founded in 2003 to address the growing need to link IT investment to business value in organizations that rely on complex computer systems.

“Leaders of large IT operations must deliver highly reliable services across a growing array of applications despite constrained budgets,” says Phil Schaadt, president and CTO of the Haddon Hill Group. “For managers of high-volume, high-complexity, business-critical IT infrastructures, Haddon Hill Group can help improve financial control and performance, governance, reliability and service support using consulting, analysis, hands-on engineering and facilitation methodologies.”

Managing computing resources cost-effectively

For managing complex IBM WebSphere Application Server environments, the Haddon Hill Group chooses IBM WebSphere CloudBurst™ Appliance. WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is delivered with a new addition to the WebSphere Application Server family, IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition for 6.1 and 7.0.

The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance dispenses WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, a virtual image of WebSphere Application Server, into the server environment.

“The important thing about the IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is that it will dispense a WebSphere product image onto your server environment or private cloud, and that virtual server will be ready in a few minutes,” says Schaadt. “You can do it in a clustered environment. And you can even roll out IBM WebSphere Process Server and get all the settings right in a fully clustered environment with a database connection, in about 90 minutes. And you can also easily manage all the configurations of IBM WebSphere Process Server that you need. All the steps that took up so much time and effort on the part of IT staff have been removed. The savings for companies with large WebSphere implementations can be in the millions.”

More choices in designing WebSphere environment

In the initial stages of the project for the financial services company, Haddon Hill Group focused on changing the way the company went about provisioning to make it more efficient. “Our HHG QuickStart Program asks basic work process and design questions about the environment that the company has never had the luxury of addressing,” says Schaadt. “These are questions like ‘When do you go about assigning TCP/IP addresses—before or after you do your security tests?’ ‘Do you want to use VMotion on Virtual Center?’ ‘Do you want one or two environments?’ ‘Do you want to be able to exchange environments between IBM Power Systems™ and x86?’ With WebSphere environments so much easier to provision and maintain, companies have more choice in designing their environment.”

HHG began rolling out the new environment with WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance included to manage provisioning and keep servers tuned with the right configuration. IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition is optimized for using WebSphere Application Server in virtualized environments on top of hypervisors such as VMware ESX and ESXi, PowerVM™ and IBM z/VM®.

$3 - 4 million in savings

Like most of HHG’s large customers, the financial services company is focused on maintaining consistency across its environments and enabling very quick rollout and takedown. “Instead of leaving configurations in the infrastructure that have already outlived their usefulness, the company wants the ability to have these environments taken back into the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance,” says Schaadt. “If they ever need them again, they can redeploy these environments quickly, which greatly conserves the company’s assets and saves a lot of time.”

The ability to roll out and roll back temporary environments to meet special needs with WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance will enable the company to earn millions more in revenue during peak sales seasons.

The company will be able to save $3 - 4 million in alternative configuration costs by using a WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance in each of its six security zones and using the ‘purple box’ to reconfigure and manage the configuration of the new physical servers that are set up,” says Schaadt. “The company will realize a payback of its investment within six months to a year from go-live.”

The customers’ own hardware is used to create the environment into which WebSphere virtual images are dispensed and managed by the appliance. At the financial services company, Haddon Hill Group has been working with the company’s x86 machines, and will soon be implementing WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance in conjunction with IBM Power Systems and PowerVM-based deployments and WebSphere Application Server.

13 - 15x faster time-to-value

In addition to lower cost of maintenance, the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance represents savings in power, hardware and floor space. “But mostly it is the consolidation and operational cost savings that companies will appreciate,” says Schaadt. “WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance is a configuration and optimization play, and represents significant opportunities for companies to consolidate servers on a much lower number of machines with the correct configuration that can be managed and maintained with much less effort. It’s making sure that your middleware is provisioned properly and your application runs on it. You can reduce your cycle time, your error rate, the overhead of managing, and the server and license expenses.”

The savings in time-to-market is also dramatic. “We’ve documented this in real time,” says Schaadt. “A development or QA server can take 40 to 60 days to be turned over to operations. Much of this time is consumed with finding the right the golden image and verifying it with security. We can reduce that to three-to-four days. WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance provides a catalog of standard configurations for the WebSphere stack, and if you’re authorized, you click and it’s there in an hour.”

The company’s IT leaders realized that even more optimizations could be made to the deployment process on the people side. With that in mind, they have made an investment in IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition to automate the requests for new development, test and production systems. They will begin to automate the current manual processes of getting work requests from one team to another, then look to improve those processes over time. This innovative use of business process management (BPM) technology will help move the organization down the path to wider adoption of BPM throughout the business.

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit click here.

For more information about the Haddon Hill Group, visit:
www.haddonhillgroup.com

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