SunGard Sheds Light On Private Cloud With Automation And Management

SunGard, a software and services company that's grown rapidly in the past few years via acquisition and successful execution, has been on a mission to consolidate its IT operations. The aggressive plan started with server virtualization, a stage that is largely complete. But the Wayne, Penn.-based company, which serves about 25,000 customers in 70 countries and operates four different businesses, knew it would also need a comprehensive management solution that would help it create, track and decommission its new virtual machines (VMs).

"For our internal IT, we pretty much have everything virtualized, even Solaris," says Guy Chapman, senior engineer for storage and virtualization in the Engineering and Architecture group at SunGard Financial Systems.

The acquisitions had created a number of business units, many with their own offices and IT infrastructure, and the virtualization initiative was the foundation for consolidation of the company's metropolitan offices.

For example, it connected all of its London offices into one building, initially moving 600 people onto three floors. (There are four floors today.) "There was no way we could power and cool all those machines in that space. We didn't have any option but to consolidate," Chapman says. There was also VM sprawl in pockets of SunGard's operations, which created a host of other concerns around warranties, maintenance and monitoring. "We found an awful lot of old desktops hosting three to four desktop VMs, and little server rooms used for testing and development," Chapman recalls.

Since the virtualization program began, SunGard has reduced its power consumption and cooling by about 80 percent, rack space by more than 90 percent and host count by about 80 percent. The success of the program didn't stop with that, however. Chapman and his team understood that successful VM implementations require more: a focus on best practices that include business continuity and security, effective storage, and automated provisioning and self-service solutions that provide more strategic control over the virtualized environment and ultimately help reduce costs.According to Chapman, there are a lot of hidden costs that aren't always understood at the start of virtualization projects. "The actual cost of virtual servers versus physical is lower, but it isn't that much lower," he says. "There are the actual costs, but there are also the support costs, which aren't trivial. And you may need to scale up on enterprise storage."

SunGard now has a group devoted to business continuity and a group devoted to security. It also has paid close attention to its storage requirements, and is now using DynamicOps' Cloud Automation Center for planning, deployment and ongoing management of its IT resources.

Chapman says his organization discovered the solution via a VM user group. "We needed a vendor that worked with multiple hypervisors, and we had to look for third-party tools," he says, adding that the SunGard environment includes Microsoft Windows, various Linux flavors, Sun Solaris, and products from Dell, EMC, VMware and Citrix. In addition to helping SunGard manage its virtual environment, the solution also integrates with its existing backup, archival and charge-back technologies. SunGard wanted to be able to manage all the platforms together, from a single management framework.

In SunGard's list of trouble-spots at the time, says Chapman, "self-service was at the top of the heap. We started that, but then got into over-consumption. So then we had to become the department of rations, and that is not a very satisfactory situation." The DynamicOps solution covers multiple vendors and enables self-service by providing governance. Developers--who are the ones primarily using the VMs--can log into an online portal and request a particular type of VM. A message is sent when the VM is created.

Policies govern the provisioning automatically, and the solution enforces process workflows and user access controls. "So now we can get back to our core job of keeping things running smoothly rather than just spinning up virtual machines," says Chapman. The self-service feature has reduced provisioning time from an average of four days to just hours.Another benefit has been the ability to move from online storage to nearline storage for specific VMs, such as those that have been inactive for a period of time. The ability to use secondary storage has saved SunGard significant storage costs. "And, we were about to run out of storage as it was," Chapman adds. That capability is delivered via integration between DynamicOps and EMC Data Domain.

Now, SunGard is implementing the next version of DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center, which Chapman says has upgrades that make the interface more extensible. "We can extend the functionality with additional workflows. For example, in the workflow that turns on a VM, it is going to be a straightforward drop-in of an additional step that adds back up," he says.

SunGard also plans to add the ability to enforce cost-based thresholds, as opposed to resource-based thresholds, in the provisioning of IT resources. "We want to ask for budgets for development managers who can then buy whatever flavors of VMs they want, rather than tell developers they have X amount of disc, CPU and memory," he says. Chapman expects that capability to be available mid-year.

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