Case Study
Global Bank Automates Distributed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Virtualization management will scale to more than 100,000 users
One of the most well-known financial institutions, with a 200year history in banking, wanted to speed time-to-market for new products and services. The company decided that providing faster employee access to IT resources could help them remain a market leader. The firm developed an IT strategy that focused on virtualization to deliver needed desktops in less than two hours rather than days or weeks. DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center became a central resource to effectively provision, deploy, and manage these new IT capabilities in a program designed to serve more than 100,000 employees around the globe.
Bank Needs Faster Access to Virtual Desktops Time-to-market is critical in financial services. In order to continuously develop and launch new products and services, employees of this public bank need rapid access to IT resources. The company first addressed this need with a virtualization program, but it still took too long to deliver a virtual desktop. The virtualization software did not automate the creation, deployment, and management of virtual desktops; the process was long and consumed more man-hours of work than was necessary or efficient. A lengthy backlog developed because the number of IT staff assigned to this process could not keep up with the growing orders and change requests. They had to manually work through the steps – get the base image, install software, link up with the connection broker, get a host name, get onto the network, and more – to reach deployment. At several points during the process, different people were involved, so orders could wait in multiple queues. In addition to this lengthy process for generating new desktops, systems often weren’t updated or reclaimed because of the backlog, creating additional inefficiencies and costs. “We deployed our virtual desktop program and then essentially hit a wall,” explained a data center director at the financial services firm. “It was labor intensive and prevented us from scaling to tens of thousands of desktops as we needed.”
Business Objectives:
Rapid time to value of flexible virtual desktop management infrastructure Ability to adapt to changing multvendor virtual desktop technologies and unique needs Customization for unique needs Preservation of existing software investments
Solution:
DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) for automated IT service delivery Design Center for fast, easy customization of unique needs
Results:
Reduced desktop provisioning time from days or weeks to less than two hours Protected existing multi-vendor software investments Large program up and running quickly Customized workflow meets special requirements
“Without DynamicOps automated provisioning and management, we would not have been able to deploy this many desktops. DynamicOps put our stalled desktop deployment plan back on track, and we can now successfully scale to meet our needs.” Data Center Director $2 Trillion Global Financial Services Firm
Phone: (781) 328-9222 | Fax: (781) 328-9223 | Email:
[email protected]
With more than half of bank employees expected to need desktop resources, it was essential to speed up and scale the system. DynamicOps Meets Bank’s Criteria Before selecting DynamicOps, the bank specified its needs for an automated solution: time-to-market requirements, reuse of existing infrastructure, management of a heterogeneous environment, no lock-in to specific vendor technologies, and the ability to manage a rapidly changing ecosystem. A very important factor was managing the multi-vendor environment, so that as the bank’s virtual desktop infrastructure changed over time, the new automated management sofwtare would be able to work quickly and easily with parts of the technology stack from vendors as diverse as VMware, Citrix (Xen Desktop), Microsoft, Leostream, Netuitive, and existing third-party tools and proprietary databases. “Virtual desktop technologies are evolving very rapidly,” explained the data center director. “We needed to have something flexible enough to accommodate changes in desktop deployment technologies regardless of the vendors that delivers them.” The DynamicOps software solves this challenge, with its ability to work in a multi-vendor environment of connection brokers, image and application deployment solutions, workload managers, physical servers, public cloud providers, and custom databases. DynamicOps supports components from many vendors: VMware, Cisco, HP, NetApp, Dell, Cisco, and many more. In addition, the desktop infrastructure for this bank is distributed and the bank wanted to maintain this environment but create centralized management of the virtualized desktops. The DynamicOps software easily fulfilled this need because it is designed to manage a large number of distributed assets across multiple sites. Tests Show DynamicOps Strengths The bank selected two components of the DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center: Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) and Design Center. Design Center is a powerful, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop development environment that helps companies rapidly extend the DCAC standard capabilities to meet their unique needs. VRM, DynamicOps’ first product in 2008, provides automated self-service delivery and management of virtual resources, both desktop and servers, in a shared, multi-tenant environment. Through a series of evaluations in the bank’s own environment, DynamicOps showed how Cloud Automation Center works with different components of the technology stack used to deploy their both their current generation and next generation virtual desktop infrastructure and handles complete end-to-end desktop provisioning. The company also evaluated options from other technology providers and systems management vendors, but found that the DynamicOps software was the best choice to meet all of its needs. One of the strengths shown during the testing was DynamicOps’ ability to manage desktop builds that are mapped to business processes and needs. The bank might have 100 desktops in the queue to build, but if a priority changed quickly, that request could jump ahead of the others before it. In addition to offering superior technology, DynamicOps’ pedigree as a spinout of Credit Suisse in 2008 made the team at this bank quite comfortable, knowing that the industry expertise of the DynamicOps team runs deep, and they fully understand the banking business and market challenges. Before making its final decision, the bank’s IT staff spoke with large financial services firms that are also DynamicOps customers.
DynamicOps Solves Unique Needs with Design Center Global enterprises have users and compute resources located around the world. In this case, the bank had people in more than 50 countries. In order to assure adequate performance, it was imperative that a user’s desktop be provisioned on resources local to where that user resided. The bank used the DynamicOps Design Center to augment the standard automation of the Cloud Automation Center to include its own custom business logic. This special capability from DynamicOps enabled a custom workflow that incorporated data from the bank’s existing databases and quickly sorted out where each user should be assigned. This workflow had to integrate with the bank’s existing databases and ecosystem and be smart enough to assign desktops to the most efficient location. If the closest data center, say London, is full, it will automatically move the request to the next closest one, maybe Scotland or France. Once the data center that insures the specified access time for the user is selected, the request then automatically moves to VRM for provisioning and management “DynamicOps Design Center was the only virtual desktop automation product that allowed us to rapidly customize and securely distribute our desktop deployment logic across multiple data centers. We accomplished this is a matter of a few weeks, which helped meet our aggressive deployment schedule,” said the data center manager. Design Center allowed the bank to reach a new level of IT service delivery without discarding prior investments in technology or significantly changing the way it operates. Because DynamicOps manages and integrates with multi-vendor and custom environments, the bank has been able to reuse existing investments, thus creating considerable savings. It didn’t have to pay for new tools and can maintain existing processes. Through the Design Center and VRM, DynamicOps has created a fully automated desktop build system for the bank, so that policies are followed, no independent, on-the-fly decisions are required by individual staff members, and the provisioning process is not manually moved from one person to another. The Design Center was also used to create a new system for Microsoft Windows 7 desktop deployment, which also reduced the number of people involved in the entire process. Initially, the bank began with a limited scale production pilot, and has now deployed the program on a much larger scale, managing thousands of VMs. There is a direct link from the bank’s portal where employees have always requested many different types of work supplies and resources to DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center to facilitate VM requests. Fast Deployment for Flexible Program One fundamental goal of the bank was rapid time to value … the ability to very quickly deploy the DynamicOps software in production. Even with the custom workflow project, it was a very short time from prototype to production and the bank met the original rollout plan schedule. The entire program moved quickly, especially considering the magnitude and complexity of the bank’s unique needs. The Design Center’s extensibility helped the bank become more efficient and productive very quickly. The software rapidly integrated several different existing technology components from various vendors and automated the end-to-end process. With virtual desktop technology evolving rapidly, the bank needed the flexibility and speed to incorporate new components quickly. Before DynamicOps, the IT staff was handling all desktop requests. After deploying DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center, program managers within business units evaluate applications from their own users. The
DynamicOps software checks a request against pre-defined policies, routes it to the appropriate server, provisions it according to workload and resources, and assigns it to the user. Administrators can even do bulk uploads, providing resources for 50 to 100 people at one time. It is a much faster and more efficient process. If a user request is outside of the policies, only then it is routed to the IT staff. DynamicOps Accelerates Virtual Desktop Program With DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center, the bank has been able to quickly move toward its goal of a worldwide virtual desktop environment, with centralized management of all desktop assets. The program is allowing employees to more easily work anywhere in the world, and always have a desktop available to them. Today, this banking leader can provide a virtual desktop to a user in less than two few hours, a significant decrease over the days or weeks it took before to get IT resources to users. By automating their process with the DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center, the bank achieved their automation goals faster and at a lower cost than other options they considered.
About DynamicOps DynamicOps enables the dynamic data center with the industry's most flexible platform for rapidly deploying IT as a service. The company offers software that simplifies and accelerates the automation, optimization, and delivery of heterogeneous virtualized IT services. DynamicOps technology has been running in mid-sized and large enterprises for five years. The technology was first deployed across four global data centers at Credit Suisse, before the financial services company launched DynamicOps to offer a commercial solution to the market in 2008. By 2010, DynamicOps customers include global 1000 enterprises, including financial services, healthcare, communications, educational, and government agencies.
DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center unifies cloud management across virtual and physical resources— running servers and desktops—in private and public clouds. The suite provides automated delivery of predefined IT services using a secure, multi-tenant private and/or public cloud infrastructure. All products are built on a single automation engine, making most service definition, capacity planning, and automated service delivery capabilities common. Results include services delivered in minutes not days, resource utilization improved at least 20-30 percent, and operational costs slashed more than 50 percent. DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center includes four components that may be used separately or together:
Physical Resource Manager offers bare-metal provisioning and lifecycle management of Windows and Linux operating systems, application software, and multiple hypervisor platforms on x86/x64-based servers. External Cloud Manager is a single portal to provision and manage private and public cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). DesignCenter rapidly integrates DCAC into existing systems and management processes while ensuring consistency with established security, multi-tenancy, policy, and controls. Virtual Resource Manager, DynamicOps’ first product, automates delivery and enforces operational control over provisioning and ongoing lifecycle management of virtual desktops and servers.
The company is privately held and based in Burlington, MA.
Phone: (781) 328-9222 | www.dynamicops.com | Email:
[email protected]
Copyright © 2008-2011 DynamicOps LLC. All rights reserved. DynamicOps is a registered trademark of DynamicOps LLC. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
