Case study HP IT accelerates service delivery with hybrid clouds Reduces deployment times from 3 months to 15 minutes with HP Cloud Service Automation Industry High Tech Objective Transform data centers to provide unified processes by adopting HP Cloud Service Automation to speed cloud service delivery Approach Implements HP Cloud Service Automation, Server Automation and Operation Orchestration IT matters Reduced deployment time from three weeks to minutes for HP s Software as a Service (SaaS) team Reduced database provisioning time from 45 days to minutes with Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) solution Reduced server deployment time from 3 months or more to 15 minutes for Infrastructure-as-a- Service (IaaS) solution Consolidated from 96 data centers to six data centers Decreased physical server count by more than 40% Reclaimed over 45% of Global Data Service s cloud database environments Minimized shadow IT and the use of external cloud service providers Business matters Reduced operational expenses by 38% Reduced lab space and footprint by 45% Improved productivity by 75% The journey we took was to consolidate, modernize, virtualize, and automate to build our cloud environment. Cloud Service Automation has been important in building our HP software private cloud for development and testing. Instead of 90 days to access a resource, our latest data show us down to 15 minutes. Larry Wong, director of engineering, HP Software Infrastructure Services With today s economic uncertainties and changing market conditions, businesses must be agile to stay competitive. Significant industry trends like cloud computing are causing IT organizations to fundamentally change what they do and how they deliver value. IT organizations must provide faster access to services for their lines of business users, simplify and protect their IT environments, reduce costs, and support innovation by showing how technology can be used to transform the business. By leveraging cloud computing, companies are increasing their agility, speeding time-to-market, and improving efficiency to enable a competitive advantage.
2 Technology leader HP offers a broad portfolio spanning printing, personal systems, software, services, and IT infrastructure. With more than 300,000 employees, HP has one billion customers in 170 countries on six continents. A few groups at HP, such as the HP IT and HP Software (HPSW) Infrastructure Services teams, have been on a journey to achieve the benefits and results expected from the cloud. Like many large enterprise organizations, HP IT teams must support the lines of businesses and respond quickly to their demands and service requests. In keeping with its history of innovation, HP Software (HPSW) Infrastructure Services began its IT transformation cloud journey three years ago, and now is optimizing compute resources used by development and testing (dev/test) teams by implementing HP Cloud Service Automation, the unified cloud management platform for brokering and managing application and infrastructure cloud services. While HP Software Infrastructure Services began providing Infrastructure-as-a Service to developers, it also is realizing significant benefits by leveraging Cloud Service Automation to deliver Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Application-as-a-Service (AaaS/ SaaS) within HP IT Global Data Services and HP SaaS teams. Because Cloud Service Automation is a solution that grows with an IT organization, it enables IT to develop and offer users a variety of services, from simple infrastructure services, to advanced, multitiered platform and application services. HPSW Infrastructure Services challenges Larry Wong, director of engineering at HP Software Infrastructure Services, and his team support more than 4,000 developers who rely upon having compute resources to do their most productive work. They are developing more than 120 products in six R&D hub locations, with more than 17,000 physical servers, and over 4,000 active VMs/per data center. Like many other large companies facing consolidation challenges because of acquisitions, HP had maintained 96 data centers worldwide. Users in each location relied on disparate processes to monitor, manage, request, and deploy resources. Each data center offered unique capabilities and tools, adhered to different policies, and infrastructure usage was siloed. What s more, service delivery levels were uneven and inconsistent. As a result, there was a need to develop processes that would better support the infrastructure dev/test teams and would also enable HP to reduce costs. Larry Wong explains, In 2010, the number of servers we had was unknown, equipment spend was highly variable and unpredictable, and developers could not get access to equipment to meet their needs. These issues affected product development roadmaps and our time to market. In the past, it often took 90 days or longer from when a developer requested a development environment until the time when he could gain access to it. HPSW Infrastructure Services team also suffered from server hoarding. It was not uncommon for a developer to hoard multiple servers for two to four years. While he may not need the server at all times, the developer would keep it because he could not afford to wait for a development environment to become available when he needed it. Lastly, shadow IT occurred, and with developers using external service provider services, this raised concerns about security and compliance risks. After identifying areas for improvement, HPSW Infrastructure Services set goals, including reducing physical server count and data center footprint by 30%, delivering resources to engineering teams in 90 minutes instead of 90 days, and reducing costs by 30%. Implementation of IaaS yields dividends by improving the business HPSW Infrastructure Services began its cloud journey when the organization implemented Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). During a three-year period, it modernized and virtualized its development environments while consolidating from 96 sites with uneven service levels to six data centers (R&D hubs) worldwide. The journey we took was to consolidate, modernize, virtualize, and automate to build our cloud environment, Wong says. HP Cloud Service Automation has been important in building our HP software private cloud for development and testing. We have been able to go from a mostly physical environment 90% to a much more virtual environment where, instead of 90 days to access a resource, we were first down to about 45 minutes, but our latest data show us down to 15 minutes. Steve Geary, HPSW Infrastructure Services operations manager, also added, One of the biggest innovation inhibitors is infrastructure acquisition. HP Cloud Service Automation applied to dev/test lowers the barrier to entry. Wong further explains that HP Infrastructure Services has exceeded its goals. We saw
a greater than 40% reduction in physical server count, almost a 50% reduction in our data center footprint, and that has resulted in a lot of savings from a power and cooling perspective. Also, we reduced operational expenditures by 38% due to a decrease in equipment and lab space. With positive changes underway, developers are becoming more productive, and work is completed faster than was possible in the past. Today, instead of submitting an IT ticket manually through the system, developers go into a self-service portal and are able to get the resources that they need to develop code much more quickly. According to Prashant Gupte, an architect at HP Cloud Solution Lab (CSL), Previously, in order to complete a task a developer had to secure a server, typically permanent and very expensive. Today, developers can use resources for the duration of a particular task and then return infrastructure resources to the resource pool. As a result, server utilization is very high. Using a unified process has increased reliability as well because there are more common variables across the data centers. In the past, there were six different processes; now there is a unified process. The benefit of HPSW s data center transformation is that it is repeatable, maintainable and an overall more efficient way to operate. We saw a greater than 40% reduction in physical server count, almost a 50% reduction in our data center footprint, and that has resulted in a lot of savings from a power and cooling perspective. Also, we reduced operational expenditures by 38% due to a reduction in equipment. - Larry Wong, director of engineering, HP Software Infrastructure Services Finally, one question often asked is why is dev/test such a good application for cloud. According to Larry Wong, with an increasing number of SaaS offerings, HPSW is transforming to more frequent releases using continuous integration. Early in the program, the HPSW Infrastructure Services team chose to implement private cloud in a dev/test environment using HP Cloud Service Automation. Dev/test in a cloud is an excellent first step for enabling agile development and handling uneven resource utilization. Dev/test workloads have frequent peaks and valleys, in contrast to operations which are managed for stability. Because of its unique workload characteristics, a cloud environment can actually better meet dev/test requirements than a dedicated physical environment. Future plans: Becoming an IT services broker Looking ahead, Larry Wong and his colleagues will continue to build upon the HP Cloud Service Automation portfolio that offers more than other product offerings in the market today, including an open, extensible hybrid cloud platform that provides heterogeneous support as well as full stack support for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services. We see ourselves becoming an IT services broker, where we have to manage services across a hybrid environment, which includes traditional IT, private cloud and potentially public cloud. So, HP Cloud Service Automation will give us the ability to manage across that environment and optimize it to provide the most effective delivery to our engineers, says Wong. HP Cloud Service Automation helps deliver Database-asa-Service (DBaaS) for Global Data Services team While IaaS was just the first step in HP s implementation of Cloud Service Automation, it can also be leveraged to support complex Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a- Service cloud service delivery models. With developers and innovation teams becoming more agile and needing faster access to services including various databases, HP IT Global Data Services decided to implement Cloud Service Automation for its Database-asa-Service (DBaaS) offering. At HP, Vincent Hong is chief of staff for HP IT Global Data Services, and Jimmy Hong is the director of engineering. Their team delivers database and data services that support HP s business systems and processes, everything from its SAP ERP solutions to storefronts, portal logistics, supply chain, and back end 3
support solutions. Global Data Services has an internal user base of more than 300,000, over 22,000 databases, more than 2,000 applications, and maintains a production availability above five-nines (99.999%). Global Data Services tackles challenges head-on Several challenges drove the need for Global Data Services to transform how it managed and delivered services. Speed of innovation and agility were among the top requirements Global Data Services heard from its users, all of whom depend on databases for successful delivery of technology solutions to solve business problems. The traditional model required multiple meetings with stakeholders, along with several manual approvals. It often took 45 days or more before a team was able to get a database provisioned for them. More importantly, it required application teams to know exactly what they wanted before initiating the service request and any adjustments had the potential to derail the entire process. Another major problem that Global Data Services faced was shadow IT. With its internal users turning to external service providers for services, there were security risks and compliance concerns for the business. Global Data Services also struggled with how to optimize infrastructure utilization, which it measured by platform density, how many applications and databases could be serviced with a given set of infrastructure. Because it was so hard to attain database services, teams would reserve or stockpile capacity, a behavior detrimental to utilization. Solution: Built for speed and agility Vincent Hong says that when his team deployed Cloud Service Automation they were surprised. Cloud Service Automation exceeded our expectations. We moved a 45 day request provisioning process, which included wait-time, meetings, approvals, and hardware procurement to one leveraging Cloud Service Automation that delivered Database-as-a-Service to within minutes. This provided Global Data Services with the agility that it needed to provide database services to its users when they needed it. Jimmy Hong expands upon the value his team provides. We support multiple database vendors. The ability to provide those services in a common fashion, through a common framework and measure, meter and orchestrate in a common way was a struggle until we were able to put them in an open framework like Cloud Service Automation. Cloud Service Automation also has helped to significantly reduce shadow IT because now it is faster, easier, and cheaper for developers to request services internally. There is no longer a need to go outside to external service providers, which helps to not only save HP money, but also alleviates security and compliance concerns. Cloud Service Automation exceeded our expectations. We moved a 45 day request provisioning process to one leveraging Cloud Service Automation that delivered Database-as-a-Service to within minutes. Vincent Hong, chief of staff, Global Data Services What s more, HP now is seeing benefits around infrastructure utilization. We measured utilization via density, looking at how much infrastructure we were using in order to service a given set of applications, Jimmy Hong says. We are finding with Cloud Service Automation s flexibility to not only provision, but to also flex and reclaim resources, we are able to achieve a density of 3X versus what we were able to do in the past. With its cloud adoption Global Data Service has more than 3,300 provisioned database environments to-date and has reclaimed more than one-half of these environments. The Cloud Paradigm that HP Cloud Service Automation enabled has resulted in an unprecedented pace of reclamation over 45%, more than ever before. Global Data Services has seen a significant gain in productivity for its team as well, with about a 75% reduction in time required to service a request. It used to take two full time employees (FTEs) from the Global Data Services team managing the entire database services request, from the meetings, manually tracking requests, and getting the approvals. With HP Cloud Service Automation, along with other automation solutions such as HP Server Automation (SA), and HP Operations Orchestration (OO), Global Data Services has 4
reduced staff down to 1/2 FTE in its team alone. Of course, this cascades down to the other stakeholders from the servers, storage, development, network teams, and others who previously needed to be involved in the process. Because of the collaboration between Global Data Services and HP Cloud Service Automation teams, feedback goes back into the product development and improvement efforts, which ultimately benefits customers. The scale of IT and our user base provided a great opportunity for us to test deployment and co-develop enhancements, Vincent Hong says. All the trials and enhancements with development went back into the software product improving the overall quality and richness. We are finding with Cloud Service Automation s flexibility to not only provision, but to also flex and reclaim resources, we are able to achieve a density of 3X versus what we were able to do in the past. Jimmy Hong, director of engineering, Global Database Services Lastly, there has been a huge impact on the business overall, with 75% of non-production environments now being provisioned via Cloud Service Automation. This gives Global Data Services the ability to quickly turn around requests requiring rapid response to support activities such as marketing campaigns, proofof-concepts, and prototypes seeds of growth and innovation. By making these environments available on demand, it is helping to enable more and faster innovation throughout HP. Future plans: Deeper and broader As far as HP s future plans for cloud services are concerned, two words sum it up: deeper and broader. We have the provisioning requirement, but want to go beyond just providing a database, Jimmy Hong says. We want to provide capabilities to create subsets of data from different data sources to do more rapid testing. We want integration for capabilities such as automatic refresh, and other deeper capabilities for our existing database services. When it comes to broader, Jimmy Hong says, While our team is focused on data services, other teams in HP are also building their offerings Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a- Service, and so forth. Because they use Cloud Service Automation, we can easily connect our offerings with theirs via a common portal. This is really where the next layer of Cloud Service Automation comes in the ability to package and manage different service offerings as holistic solutions. HP Cloud Service Automation enables an integrated global service catalog for HP SaaS In addition to infrastructure and database services, the HP SaaS Team is leveraging HP Cloud Service Automation to support its Software as a Service offerings. These efforts include developing cloud solutions, putting technologies and products together to solve pain points for customers, and managing implementations for external and internal customers. To date, successes include faster solution deployment for its customers. For more than ten years, the HP SaaS team has offered Software as a Service for its major IT Operations Management and Application Delivery Management products, including Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Business Service Management (BSM), and Application Performance Management (APM). The HP SaaS business takes HP s management portfolio of software and delivers them as a service to more than 800 internal and external customers from enterprise to SMBs. Ramachandran Varadharajan, senior director at HP Software, works in an organization known as the Cloud Solutions Lab (CSL). His team focuses on developing cloud solutions, and putting technologies and products together to solve pain points for HP customers. A priority for his team is taking solutions and working with internal and external customers on implementations. Varadharajan has worked closely with the HP IT teams including Infrastructure Services, Global Data Services, and most recently with the HP SaaS team. 5
Customer at a glance Application Enterprise Software Software HP Cloud Service Automation HP SaaS exceptional user experience delivered Nir Shayah, director of Technical Operations at HP works in the HP Software as a Service Organization. Nir explains that the HP SaaS team has several goals, the first of which is to provide an exceptional user experience. Moreover, the team is committed to supporting high availability and ensuring rapid response to customer requests, such as provisioning user environments and adding or removing resources. Like the other HP IT teams, the HP SaaS team faces many challenges. It must quickly deliver application services and rapidly respond to customer requests. It also must efficiently address the complexity of an environment by taking all the products and technologies, putting them together, and delivering them as a service. While all these efforts take time, customers demand quick turnaround, so time to value is a top priority. Reducing complexity, speeding delivery HP Cloud Service Automation has helped the HP SaaS team in a number of ways to meet its business objectives and has seen some real benefits. According to Varadharajan, The HP SaaS business is using Cloud Service Automation to deploy Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) one of our products as a service. In the past it used to take roughly three weeks, with highly technical folks, to put these pieces together and deliver them as a service. Today, with Cloud Service Automation it takes about 90 minutes for an entry level technician to deliver the service, which is a fairly significant change. Nir further adds, The HP Cloud Service Automation implementation reduced the need for the storage, network, database and monitoring engineers to take actions during the process of new customers environment setup. Precious technical resources are diverted to address customers needs rather than repeatable actions. Future plans: Expanding across HP s product portfolio The HP SaaS team views Cloud Service Automation as the foundation for hybrid cloud and as it expands its environment, the HP SaaS team will be able to quickly replicate and create new services by leveraging its expertise with Cloud Service Automation. While it began delivering ALM Software as a Service, future plans will include expanding across HP s portfolio of products, including HP Business Service Management (BSM), and Storage Provisioning Manager (SPM). The HP SaaS business is using Cloud Service Automation to deploy Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). In the past it used to take roughly three weeks, with highly technical folks. Today, with Cloud Service Automation it takes about 90 minutes for an entry level technician. Ramachandran Varadharajan, senior director, HP Software HP IT has started its cloud journey to reap the benefits of cloud computing. These three stories are just a few examples of how HP IT is using cloud technology to become more nimble, develop applications faster, and support innovation to drive new business opportunities. HP IT is deploying cloud services across the entire organization to accelerate its business transformation. So stay tuned. Sign up for updates hp.com/go/getupdated Share with colleagues Rate this document Copyright 2013 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. 4AA5-0471ENW, December 2013