Architecting an Agile Datacenter

Tim Hays

Director, IT

Agenda

• Background on Lextron

• In the beginning…

• The challenge

• The process

• Results

• Advice

Lextron, Inc.

Lextron, Inc.

• Industry: Wholesale Distribution + Retail

• Size: + $500 million + 60 locations

• Location: US - Canada

• Products – Services:

– The Lextron distribution network markets products to

veterinarians, farm supply dealers, poultry and livestock

producers.

– Products: pharmaceuticals, grain conditioners, farm and ranch

supplies, plus animal/feed management software and hardware

applications.

• Centralized Datacenter

In the beginning…

What’s the difference between a fairy tale and a war story?

In the beginning…

What’s the difference between a fairy tale and a war story?

• A fairy tale begins with…Once upon a time…

• A war story begins with…There I was…

There I was…

• Ten years ago…new job…

– Racks of servers, racks of storage

– No place to add more racks

– Maintenance costs!

– Power and cooling barely adequate

– ERP system was so slow…“We would have made our sales

budget this month if the computer wasn’t so slow!”

– ERP could hardly process a days work in a day.

Fast Forward…

• We fixed all that…

• Company growth through acquisition

• Twice the size by revenue

• 3 ERP systems

• Virtualization in parts of the data center

• Some experience with VM on staff

• VoIP

• LAN virtualization

• Dread of ERP change, based on mitigated disaster of 10 years prior

The Challenge: SAP

• Merging 3 ERP systems to one

• Hope to double the size of the company

• Solution must scale with the growth of the company

• Limited hardware budget

• Solution must be fast, fast, fast

• No idea how to size the system for speed and growth

• What if we are wrong? ****!!!!!!!!

Big Idea

• Agile Datacenters are virtual

• Agile SAP deployments are virtual

What we had…

• Racks of gear

• Bigger AC

• Bigger generator

• Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance

– $$

– Staff time

• Time spent on legacy system support

• Time not spent on innovation, invention

• We were not agile

What we have now…(part 1)

• VMware: vSphere 4.1

– 4 Proliant nodes

– running HA and dynamic resource balancing

– totaling 450GB of memory and 32 cores

– runs 75 virtual machines, windows and linux (including

Exchange and SQL)

– EMC CX4-120 with 66GB of SSD in FAST Cache and ~90

spindles

What we have now…(part 2)

• HP Integrity

– 4 BL870 nodes

– 32 Itanium cores and 400 GB memory

– running HP-UX 11.3112 HP-UX

– 24 virtual machines, which can be online migrated

between physical blades

– EMC CX4-240 with the ERP Central Instance in SSD and

the rest in ~30 spindles.

Green IT

• 80 % reduction in datacenter space

• 45% reduction in cooling requirements

• 40% reduction in power requirements

Challenge 2: The SAP Landscape

• Avoid the business risk of making the wrong decision

regarding hardware sizing. Must be fast, fast, fast

• Limited budget

• “How do you size this thing?”

• Spend capital over time

• Account for business growth without a forklift change to

data center equipment

• Account for disaster recovery

The Process

• Tried to find a couple SAP reference customers running SAP

virtually in production - There weren’t any!

• Weighed benefits against risks

• Decided to be first

• Rolled the dice and never looked back

Driving Factors

• How did we decide?

– Built on previous experience and success with VMware and HP

virtual servers

– Build on existing talent

– Conducted sizing SAP sizing exercises (3x)

• Ultimately how did we decide?

– Money!

– Estimated year one capital savings $600,000

physical ($1,000,000) vs. virtual ($400,000)

Results

• Just finished implementation of SAP in Feb.

• Consultants tell us it is the fastest SAP system they have ever

seen.

• Project was on time and on budget

• Company acquired a business during the implementation of SAP

(grew 20%) – no problem

• Company just announced plans to acquire one of its largest

competitors, which will double the size of the

organization by revenue and head count.

• We aren’t worried!

Main Point

• Agile datacenters are virtual

• Virtual

– Servers

– Storage

– WAN

Implementation Challenges

• Vendors: “It can’t be done” “must be physical hardware”

• Lack of reference customers

• Staff training

• Vendor training

• New storage platform

• New way to think about storage

• “How big should I make this server?”

• “Where should I put this data?”

Agile Advantages

• Takes the risks out of sizing questions

• Flexibility to tune the system, change your mind, or try things

out

• Cost containment - don’t blow up the budget: spend a little at

a time, grow as you go

• Reduce risk of poor decisions making, poor planning,

unforeseen circumstances

• Business risk avoidance by not having to forklift hardware

Advice

• Hire smart people

• Make vendors plan for 5x growth even if you only intend to

buy 1x now (plan to grow!)

• Monitoring tools – spend the money and the time to be

able to know what’s going on in the box

Lessons Learned

• Agility through virtualization has forever changed how we think

about and scope IT projects

• Virtualization provides the freedom to experiment

• Agility reduces risks

• Virtualization allows IT to flex with the organization

• Agile organizations are cost effective

THANK YOU!

Tim Hays

Director, IT