How Did PacLib Group Ease Growing Pains Without a Massive IT Spend?

Design and Construction Firm Consolidates Applications and Cuts Costs With Dell Equipment and Microsoft Hyper-V

“As the company has grown rather rapidly, we’ve had to make some quick changes. Virtualisation gives us the flexibility to do all the things we couldn’t do before, and we’ve had zero issues with both Hyper-V and our Dell EqualLogic servers.” — David Furey, IT manager, PacLib Group.

One of the largest private landowners in New South Wales (NSW), the PacLib Group is a tightly integrated provider of planning, project management, construction, storage and related services. Its subsidiary businesses — including PacLib Industrial, PacLib Commercial, PacDirt, Whitehorse Constructions and others — employ 140 people and handle some of the largest civil works projects in NSW.

As a fledgling business, PacLib Group used Microsoft® Small Business Server to manage its operations. Strong growth prompted the company to build out its IT environment with a broad range of Microsoft server products, and to enable remote access to applications such as Microsoft® Exchange to more than 70 employees using Windows® mobile-based devices. For years, all of PacLib Group’s applications ran under Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 on Dell PowerEdge™ servers.

As PacLib Group expanded, it became clear that the organisation needed a new technological direction. “We started looking at how we could streamline what we were doing, and how we could better utilise our hardware to get more than just five to 10 percent usage,” said David Furey, IT manager of the PacLib Group. “Our main motivation was to ease support of our many businesses, and we knew that to get better performance from the Dell servers, we needed to consider server virtualisation,” he added.

Same Result for a Fraction of the Cost

After engaging a local IT services provider to audit its environment, PacLib Group decided that Microsoft® Hyper-V™ virtualisation software could meet its business requirements while providing value for money.

A consistent early tester of Microsoft products throughout its history, PacLib Group opted to install a beta version of Hyper-V on Dell PowerEdge™ 2950 and Dell PowerEdge™ 1950 servers. The company found that the combination delivered rock-solid performance — even as a beta. The results were so convincing that PacLib Group quickly began migrating its core systems onto a new Microsoft Windows Server 2008 domain and a Hyper-V virtualised environment. Before long, PacLib Group had its core systems — ranging from Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft® SQL Server® to proprietary physical security solutions — running in the virtualised environment and had converged its 16 physical servers onto just three Dell servers.

“We had zero issues with the Hyper-V beta, which did just what it promised to do,” said Furey. “Our servers went from very low utilisation to more like 60 percent utilisation and we have been able to leverage the capabilities of our Dell servers. And given the Microsoft virtualisation solution’s value for money, we have been able to use funding elsewhere in the business that we would otherwise have had to allocate to the project.”

Easier Management

The reduction in physical server numbers has provided immediate cost reductions for the PacLib Group, which has slashed heating and cooling costs by “thousands of dollars,” according to Furey. These reductions also provide direct environmental benefits, reducing carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by an amount equivalent to taking eight cars off the road every year.

But the biggest benefit of the move is the ease with which PacLib Group’s new infrastructure can be easily modified to add new applications and to support new business ventures.

Broad support for Hyper-V across Microsoft's product line has minimised the complexity of setting up the virtualised server environment, and Furey says that adding new Microsoft components became easier with a Microsoft-built hypervisor in place.

“Microsoft products just work with other Microsoft products,” he said. “Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is a living platform, and we can see where it is all going. Supported by the reliability and performance of Dell PowerEdge servers, we can depend on this environment to get us where we need to be — and do it as easily as possible,” Furey added.

One advantage of the virtualised environment is faster setup and patching of servers, which can be brought online and offline as needed. When virtual servers need to be patched, for example, they can be updated and restarted within a minute or two during the business day, rather than having to wait until after hours, when users are not affected by longer outages.

Development and testing work has also become easier, since virtual machines can be set up and decommissioned easily, as new applications are configured and evaluated. Since the PacLib Group already has Microsoft SQL Server virtual machines running, Furey expects that an upcoming implementation of Microsoft® Dynamics™ GP business software will be easier than ever.

A Robust Foundation

With its core business applications concentrated on a smaller number of servers, Furey is acutely aware of the need to ensure hardware continuity. That is where the robust design of the Dell EqualLogic™ PS5000X Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage environment comes in. Providing 4TB of hypervisor-aware storage, the EqualLogic system works with Microsoft® System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to take regular snapshots of PacLib Group’s Hyper-V virtual machines. These snapshots are copied onto a deduplication storage solution before being transferred to a Dell LTO-122T tape library, providing a regular backup of the company’s core applications and easing recovery, should disaster strike.

“The snapshotting capabilities and redundant physical design of the Dell EqualLogic storage array give us more confidence to have virtualisation in our back end,” said Furey. “We have multiple layers of backup, and the only issue we have had to deal with is making sure our network links have enough capacity to keep up.”

“This just confirms why I have always liked Dell servers,” Furey added. “They have always performed, we have never had any major issues, and when we need Dell’s help they are there for us. We have been extremely happy with this whole solution, because it has allowed us to get more out of what we have while spending less money.”

Customer Profile

PacLib Group’s various subsidiary businesses provide a full range of industrial, commercial and residential development services across Australia, giving leading Australian and global companies full turnkey solutions in construction, civil works, storage, property management, project management and other related areas. The businesses collectively employ 125 people.

Challenge

As PacLib Group’s business expanded, it outgrew its initial IT infrastructure and needed a more robust, scalable and powerful application platform to take it into the future. Deploying a Microsoft Windows 2003 Server environment on Dell PowerEdge servers gave PacLib Group the right foundation. Then PacLib Group began exploring server virtualisation as a way to consolidate its 16 separate servers and to speed its ability to configure, patch, maintain and back up its core applications.

Solution

PacLib Group has migrated its 16 core application servers to Dell PowerEdge 2950 and Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers, each of them running Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V server virtualisation solution. A Dell EqualLogic PS5000X iSCSI provides 4TB of high-availability storage and backs up regular snapshots of Hyper-V virtual machines to a deduplication storage system, then to a Dell LTO-122T tape library unit for maximum reliability.

Benefits

• Selecting Hyper-V gave PacLib Group all the virtualisation capabilities it required at low cost.
• The high-reliability design of Dell PowerEdge servers keeps PacLib Group applications up and running even in the event of hard drive or other physical failure.
• Server utilisation has jumped from under 10 percent to 60 percent or more in the virtualised environment.
• Dell hypervisor-aware EqualLogic PS5000X storage array complements the specific requirements of the virtualised server environment.
• Core business applications can be installed, tested, upgraded and decommissioned in minutes, instead of hours.
• Reductions in power consumption and associated cooling requirements have reduced PacLib Group's datacentre operating costs by thousands of dollars.

How it Works

Hardware

Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers

Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers

Dell EqualLogic™ PS5000X hypervisor-aware storage array

Dell PowerConnect™ 5548 and 6248P Ethernet switches

Dell LTO-122T tape library

Software

Microsoft Hyper-V

Microsoft Windows Server 2008

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007