Windows Server 2008 R2Customer Solution Case Study

Financial Firm Speeds Acquisitions by 75 Percent, Trims $1.5 Million with Hyper-V

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Financial services

Customer ProfileDuff & Phelps is a global financial advisory firm with 28 offices and 1,600 employees. It specializes in business valuation, investment banking, financial restructuring, dispute, and taxation.

Business SituationDuff & Phelps needed an IT infrastructure that could keep up with its rapid growth. The firm bought several servers a week and struggled to keep up with rising costs and IT management work.

SolutionThe firm virtualized its data center and field offices by using Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft System Center data center solutions.

Benefits Acquisition time reduced by 75 percent Greater infrastructure flexibility Faster resource deployment Savings of U.S.$1.5 million Increased service availability Improved performance for older

applications

“We’ve reduced acquisition integration time by at least 75 percent.… By using Hyper-V, we’ve freed the business to grow as fast as it wants to grow.”

Annur Sumar, Vice President of Information Technology, Duff & Phelps

Duff & Phelps, global financial advisor, enjoyed rapid growth but sought a faster and more cost-effective way to add the IT resources needed to support its growth. Its answer was to switch from VMware to Hyper-V technology in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and to virtualize more than 200 physical servers. Today, acquisitions are integrated into the Duff & Phelps IT landscape 75 percent faster, in days rather than weeks. Duff & Phelps has a more flexible data center and can deploy IT resources 10 times faster, which helps it roll out new services more quickly. It also saves money, realizing a cost avoidance of U.S.$1 million in hardware; $250,000 in server power, cooling, and housing; and salaries of three full-time IT staff members. By using Windows clustering and virtualized disaster recovery, the firm has raised service availability from 99 to 99.99 percent.

SituationDuff & Phelps is a prominent global independent provider of financial advisory and investment banking services, focusing on valuation, transactions, financial restructuring, dispute, and taxation. The firm is based in New York City and has offices and employees around the world.

Beginning in 2006, Duff & Phelps began a rapid growth spurt that has not stopped, acquiring firms and also growing organically. Annur Sumar joined the Duff & Phelps IT organization as the growth was beginning and was tasked with keeping the fast-growing business supplied with IT services. It was a struggle. “Deploying a physical server took two weeks, and we were deploying two to three servers a week,” says Sumar, Vice President of Information Technology at Duff & Phelps. “IT slowed down the business because it took so long to integrate the IT infrastructures of our acquisitions and add new servers for new projects. We needed to get new acquisitions and application projects up and running in our environment as quickly as possible so that they could start adding value to the business.”

All those servers were also hurting the firm’s bottom line. Not only were they expensive to acquire, but the power, cooling, and management costs soon exceeded the purchase price—and continued for the life of the server. Duff & Phelps also was running out of room in its data center and was looking at spending a significant amount of dollars to expand it. Branch offices, too, needed an ever-growing number of servers, and deploying

and caring for them at a distance was another rising expense.

Duff & Phelps had launched a small virtualization effort using early versions of VMware virtualization software, but the technology did not make it past the development and test teams. “The firm was hesitant to pursue virtualization in its production environment primarily because it was a new emerging technology at the time that required a hefty upfront investment in hardware and software,” Sumar says. “But to maintain our rapid growth and deliver on business projects, we really needed to virtualize.”

SolutionIn late 2008, Sumar’s management team agreed to provide a limited budget to investigate the latest virtualization options. Sumar set out to find the best virtualization bargain.

Virtualized 200 Servers on a Limited BudgetSumar met with VMware first but, “based on the limited budget we had available, VMware wasn’t able to offer many options,” he recalls. “Microsoft had just introduced the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology, so I contacted CDW, our Microsoft Software Assurance Partner. After working vigorously with them to understand our Microsoft Software Assurance benefits, CDW’s final recommendation was that we upgrade our Windows Server 2008 Enterprise licenses to Windows Server 2008 Datacenter licenses, which would give us the licensing rights for an unlimited number of virtual machines on each Windows Server 2008 R2 host server. The total cost to upgrade the licensing for

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“The total cost to upgrade the licensing for all our Hyper-V servers was well within our budget.”

Annur Sumar, Vice President of Information Technology, Duff & Phelps

all our Hyper-V servers was well within our budget. That investment enabled us to virtualize most of our physical servers—more than 200, in both data centers and our field offices—reducing them to about 14 hosts. We got an amazing return on that initial investment.”

Another factor influenced the firm’s decision. Not only did it find the pricing for Hyper-V significantly less than VMware licensing, but Duff & Phelps took a keen interest in cloud computing (specifically private cloud computing) and recognized that Microsoft not only had a better pricing model but a better product road map to implement private cloud computing. (A private cloud is a pool of dynamically allocated, virtualized computing and storage resources dedicated to a single organization’s use.)

“We know that Microsoft is innovating and leading the way for public and private cloud computing, and we feel that leveraging Hyper-V for virtualization gives us a solid foundation for a private cloud,” Sumar says.

Virtualized for GrowthDuff & Phelps had such a spectacular success with virtualization on a very small budget, that Sumar’s upper management soon allocated a full budget to the effort. Today, the Duff & Phelps virtual landscape consists of eight highly available powerful host servers divided between its main data center and a disaster recovery location, and 28 host servers in field locations. In its data center, Duff & Phelps uses HP ProLiant DL580 G7 servers, each with four Intel Xeon processors and 256 gigabytes (GB) of RAM. These servers are clustered for high

availability between the production and disaster recovery sites, with about 160 virtual machines (VMs) at each site. The clusters are attached to an EMC Clariion storage area network.

The firm’s field servers are smaller—HP ProLiant DL380 G7 servers—with two Intel Xeon processors and 32 GB of RAM. “HP servers have been really stable and served us well for a long time,” Sumar says. ”The newest Intel Xeon processors accommodate amazingly high virtual machine density and have provided excellent results for server performance in both our data centers and field offices.”

Across these 32 servers, Duff & Phelps has created about 400 virtual machines. The data center servers have a density of 80 virtual machines to each host server and the field servers have a density of about 16 virtual machines per host server. “We’re only at about 33 percent utilization on most of our servers and believe that we can fit about 200 percent more VMs in our environment,” Sumar says. “We want to use this extra capacity for virtual desktops.”

Sumar plans to virtualize desktop computers, just as the firm has virtualized servers, by using Hyper-V and the Remote Desktop Services feature of Windows Server 2008 R2. “We explored using VMware for desktop virtualization, but after thoroughly evaluating our bottom line, it seemed significantly more expensive and complex compared to Hyper-V,” Sumar says. “To create virtual desktops with VMware, an IT administrator has to be knowledgeable about the end-to-end VMware ESX infrastructure, the VMware View infrastructure, licensing for both, and

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“We know that Microsoft is innovating and leading the way for public and private cloud computing, and we feel that leveraging Hyper-V for virtualization gives us a solid foundation for a private cloud.”

Annur Sumar, Vice President of Information Technology, Duff & Phelps

how VMware licensing pertains to Windows licensing. With Hyper-V, an IT administrator just has to know how the built-in features of Windows work, and with a single licensing vendor.”

The Hyper-V hosts at Duff & Phelps run Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter with Service Pack 1 (SP1). Guest virtual machine operating systems range from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Duff & Phelps also uses a few instances of Red Hat and customized Linux to run specialized applications. “The ability to support other operating systems in our virtual environment is great,” Sumar says. “It gives us a unified management infrastructure so that we don’t need to also run other platforms to virtualize these few Linux servers.”

Duff & Phelps has virtualized all significant production applications by using Hyper-V: its customer relationship management system, databases running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software, messaging servers running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Multifaceted Management SuiteDuff & Phelps invested in a Microsoft Server Management Suite Enterprise license to cost-effectively license the entire suite of Microsoft System Center data center solutions. It uses Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1 to deploy and manage virtual machines and manage its entire physical and virtual estate from one console.

“We’re looking at System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 and love it,” Sumar

says. “By using it, we’ll be able to implement server application virtualization, which will enable us to run system-independent applications. We’ll be able to very easily migrate running application workloads between servers, which will be huge for us. We’ll also have the capability to implement integrated storage provisioning, which will enable us to create internal cloud platforms and separate development from production infrastructures.”

Duff & Phelps uses Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 to deploy operating systems and applications to all desktops and portable computers, apply security updates, maintain inventory of its hardware and software, remotely assist users, and provide asset information for its help-desk staff. It uses Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 to back up virtual machines, especially to back up Cluster Shared Volumes.

Duff & Phelps also uses Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to monitor the performance of all servers and applications. “With System Center Operations Manager, we’ll be able to use integrated policies to automate IT processes in response to business needs,” Sumar says. “We can create alert-driven responses and automated responses to do things like provision new virtual machines or restart applications that have stopped working. By using System Center Virtual Machine Manager and System Center Operations Manager together, we can build intelligence into our infrastructure so that the infrastructure increasingly takes care of itself rather than requiring constant IT

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“[With Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012], we’ll be able to very easily migrate running application workloads between servers, which will be huge for us.”

Annur Sumar, Vice President of Information Technology, Duff & Phelps

oversight. Our goal is self-managing dynamic systems.”

BenefitsBy virtualizing its entire data center and field server infrastructure, Duff & Phelps has achieved unprecedented business agility, responsiveness, cost reduction, and availability of critical services.

Acquisition Time Reduced 75 PercentThe most important result of making changes in its data center has been the firm’s ability to dramatically speed up acquisition integration. “We’ve reduced acquisition integration time by at least 75 percent,” Sumar says. “We did a recent acquisition in 48 hours versus two to three weeks. We simply P2V the servers [migrate the workloads from physical servers to virtual machines], standardize them for our environment, and, voila, we’re done. We don’t have to worry about bringing nonstandard hardware into our data centers, which don’t have room for new servers anyway. By using Hyper-V, we’ve freed the business to grow as fast as it wants to grow.”

Greater Infrastructure FlexibilityWith virtualization, Duff & Phelps has been able to move toward what Sumar calls infrastructure portability, whereby the IT organization can run applications and services wherever it makes sense: on-premises, in a private cloud, in a public cloud, or in a combination of deployments. “Eventually, we’ll be able to pick up our entire data center and move it to another geographical location or to a public or private cloud,” Sumar says. “This is every organization’s dream, and we’re well on our way.”

Resources Deployed 10 Times Faster The Duff & Phelps IT team can now deploy new (virtual) servers in minutes rather than weeks. It has found that the speed of IT resource deployment determines how fast application developers can get going on new projects. “With virtualization, we are turning projects around for development teams 10 times faster. Having two weeks or more shaved off every new project means faster project delivery,” says Sumar. “The business isn’t waiting on IT anymore, which eliminates contention between the infrastructure and development teams. Instead of being the bottleneck for development and business teams, the infrastructure team has become a project enabler and a reliable asset. Having stronger relationships among departments strengthens the whole business and helps us do a better job for our customers.”

Cost Avoidance of Nearly $1.5 MillionIt is important to Duff & Phelps to be able to move faster in the fast-moving financial marketplace. But because its job is helping its customers save money, saving money is important to Duff & Phelps, too. Sumar estimates that the firm is saving close to U.S.$1.5 million a year in hardware cost avoidance and related costs. It would have spent $1 million on new servers, $150,000 to house them, $100,000 to power and cool them, and about three new full-time staff members to maintain and manage them. “Just think where that initial small investment has led the firm,” Sumar says. “It’s led to savings of millions of dollars. That certainly says something to our customers about our team’s financial talent.”

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“Eventually, we’ll be able to pick up our entire data center and move it to another geographical location or to a public or private cloud. This is every organization’s dream, and we’re well on our way.”

Annur Sumar, Vice President of Information Technology, Duff & Phelps

From Two-Nines to Four-Nines Availability A virtualized environment is also a more available environment. When a physical server fails, the highly available virtual machines automatically migrate from the failed server to a healthy server with minimal downtime. “The high availability due to Hyper-V failover clustering and live migration has worked wonders for us,” Sumar says. “We’ve been able to centralize storage for virtual machines, as well as [centralize] the virtual machine deployment process, which has given us a very easy, transparent infrastructure for maintaining application availability. Before, we provided 99 percent uptime; today, we can provide 99.99 percent, a four-nines, uptime.”

The use of virtualization has increased the firm’s disaster recovery speed, too, by a factor of three. Instead of manually restoring 150 or more application servers and building the hardware to restore them, Duff & Phelps is now able to transfer the virtual workloads to new host servers in its remote data center. “Our RTO [recovery time objective] went from two days to four hours, which is really an amazing

accomplishment and very important to the business,” Sumar says.

Improved Performance for Older ApplicationsDuff & Phelps has been able to boost the performance of older financial applications that need to run on older operating systems. By running these applications and operating systems on virtual machines, Duff & Phelps has been able to transparently move them to new hardware. “The benefits of Hyper-V just keep going,” Sumar says. “Even the oldest elements in our infrastructure have sped up by running them in a virtual environment.”

Windows Server 2008 R2Windows Server 2008 R2 is a multipurpose operating system designed to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server and private cloud infrastructure, helping you to save time and reduce costs. It provides you with powerful tools to react to business needs faster than ever before with greater control and confidence.

For more information, visit:

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Duff & Phelps services, call (866) 282-8258 or visit the website at: www.duffandphelps.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter

with Service Pack 1− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007 R2− Microsoft System Center Data

Protection Manager 2010− Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager 2007 R2− Microsoft System Center Virtual

Machine Manager 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware 4 HP ProLiant DL580 G7 servers with four

Intel Xeon processors and 256 GB of RAM

28 HP ProLiant DL380 G7 servers with two Intel Xeon processors and 32 GB of RAM

EMC Clariion storage area network

www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server

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