Virtualization Simplifies Disaster Recovery for Insurance Broker Myron Steves While Delivering Efficiency and Agility Gains Too

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how small-and-medium businesses can improve disaster recovery through virtualization, while reaping additional benefits.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

We now present a sponsored podcast discussion on how insurance wholesaler Myron Steves & Co. developed and implemented an impressive IT disaster recovery (DR) strategy.

We'll see how small business Myron Steves made a bold choice to go essentially 100 percent server virtualized in 90 days. That then set the stage for a faster, cheaper, and more robust DR capability. It also helped them improve their desktop-virtualization delivery, another important aspect of maintaining constant business continuity.

Based in Houston, Texas, and supporting some 3,000 independent insurance agencies in that region, with many protected properties in the active hurricane zone at the Gulf of Mexico, Myron Steves needs to have all sources up and available, if and when severe storms strike. To help those less fortunate, employees need to be operational from home, if necessary, when a natural disaster occurs. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We'll learn how the IT executives at Myron Steves adopted an advanced DR and virtualization approach to ensure that it can help its customers -- regardless of the circumstances. At the same time, they also set themselves up for improved IT efficiency and agility for years to come.

Here to share in more detail on how a small- to medium-sized business (SMB) can modernize DR completely for far better responsiveness is Tim Moudry, Associate Director of IT at Myron Steves & Co. Welcome, Tim.

Tim Moudry: Hello. How are you doing, Dana?

Gardner: I am doing great. Thanks for being with us. We're also here with William Chambers, IT Operations Manager at Myron Steves. And welcome to you also, William.

William Chambers: Thanks. Hello. How are you?

Gardner: We're doing well. Tim, let me throw a first question out at you. Hurricane Ike, back in 2008, was the second costliest hurricane ever to make landfall in the U.S. and, fortunately, it was a near miss for you and your data center, but as I understand, this was a wake-up call for you on what your DR approach lacked.

What was the biggest lesson you learned from that particular incident, and what spurred you on then to make some changes?

Moudry: Before Hurricane Ike hit, William and I saw an issue and developed a project that we presented to our executive committee. Then, when Hurricane Ike came about, which was during this time that we were presenting this, it was an easy sell.

When Hurricane Ike came, we were on another DR system. We were testing it, and it was really cumbersome. We tried to get servers up and running. We stayed there to recover one whole day and never got even a data center recovered.

Easy sell

When we came to VMware, we made a proposal to our executive committee, and it was an easy sell. We did the whole project for the price of one year of our old DR system.

Gardner: What was your older system? Were you doing it on an outsourced basis? How did you do it?

Moudry: We were with another company, and they gave us facilities to recover our data. They were also doing our backups.

We went to that site to recover systems and we had a hard time recovering anything. So William and I were chatting and thinking that there's got to be a better way. That’s when we started testing a lot of the other virtualization software. We came to VMware, and it was just so easy to deploy.

William was the one that did all that, and he can go on with that more later, but we just came to VMware and it became a little bit easier.

Gardner: Tell me about the requirements. What was it that you wanted to do differently or better, after recognizing that you got away with Ike, but things may not go so well the next time? William, what were your top concerns about change?

Chambers: Our top concerns were just avoiding what happened during Ike. In the building we're in in Houston, we were without power for about a week. So that was the number one cause for virtualization.

Number two was just the amount of hardware. Somebody actually called us and said, "Can you take these servers somewhere else and plug them in and make them run?" Our response was no.

Moudry: We were running 70 servers at the time.

Chambers: They were the physical servers.

Moudry: Yeah, so that was about four racks of servers.

Chambers: That was the lead into virtualization. If we wanted everything to be mobile like that, we had to go with a different route.

Gardner: So you had sort of a two-pronged strategy. One was to improve your DR capabilities, but embracing virtualization as a means to do that also set you up for some other benefits. How did that work? Was there a nice synergy between these that played off one another?

Chambers: Once you get into it, you think, "Well, okay, this is going to make us mobile, and we'll be able to recover somewhere else quicker," but then you start seeing other features that you can use that would benefit what you are doing at smaller physical size. It's just the mobility of the data itself, if you’ve got storage in place that will do it for you. Recovery times were cut down to nothing.

Simpler to manage

There was ease of backups, everything that you have to do on a daily maintenance schedule. It just made everything simpler to manage, faster to manage, and so on.

Gardner: I talk to large enterprises a lot and I hear about issues when they are dealing with 10,000 seats, but you are a smaller enterprise, about 200 employees, is that right?

Moudry: Yeah, about 200.

Gardner: And so for you as an SMB, what requirements were involved? You obviously don't have unlimited resources and you don't have a huge IT staff. What was an important aspect from that vantage point?

Chambers: It’s probably what any other IT shop wants. They want stability, up-time, manageability, and flexibility. That’s what any IT shop would want, but we're a small shop. So we had to do that with fewer resources than some of the bigger Exxons and stuff like that.

Moudry: And they don’t want it to cost an arm and a leg either.

Gardner: For the benefit of our listeners, let’s talk a little bit about Myron Steves. Tell us about the company, what you do, and why having availability of your phones, your email, and all of your systems is so important to what you do for your customers.

Moudry: We're an insurance broker. We're not a carrier. We are between carriers and agents. With our people being on the phone, up-time is essential, because they're on the phone quoting all the time. That means if we can’t answer our phones, the insurance agent down the street is going to go pick up the phone, and they're going to get the business somewhere else.

Now, we're trying to get more green in the industry, and we are trying to print less paper

Also, we do have claims. We don't process all claims, but we do some claims, mainly for our stuff that's on the coast. After a hurricane, that’s when people are going to want that.

Now, we're trying to get more green in the industry, and we are trying to print less paper. That means we're trying to put the policies up there on the website, a PDF or something like that. Most likely, when they write the policy, they're not going to download that policy and keep it. It’s just human nature. They're going to say, "They’ve got it up there on the Web."

We have to be up all the time. When a disaster strikes, they are going to say, "I need to get my policy," and then they are going to want to go to our website to download that policy, and we have to be up. It’s the worst time I guess.

Chambers: And not many people are going to pack their paper policy when they evacuate or something like that.

Gardner: So the phones are essential. I also talk with a lot of companies and I ask them, which applications they choose to virtualize first. They have lots of different rationales for that, but you guys just went kit and caboodle. Tell me about the apps that are important to you and why you went 100 percent virtualized in such a short time?

SAN storage

Chambers: We did that because we’ve got applications running on our servers, things like rating applications, emails, our core applications. A while back, we separated the data volumes from the physical server itself. So the data volume is stored on a storage area network (SAN) that we get through an iSCSI.

That made it so easy for us to do a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion on the physical server. Then in the evenings, during our maintenance period, we shut that physical server down and brought up the virtual connected to the SAN one, and we were good. That’s how we got through it so quickly.

Gardner: So having taken that step of managing your data first, I also understand you had some virtual desktop activity go on there earlier. That must have given you some experience and insights into virtualization as well.

Chambers: Yeah, it did.

Moudry: William moved us to VMware first and then after we saw how VMware worked so well, we tried out VMware View and it was just a no-brainer, because of the issues that we had before with Citrix and because of the way Citrix works. One session affects all the others. That’s where VMware shines, because everybody is on their independent session.

Gardner: I notice that you're also a Microsoft shop. Did you look at their virtualization or DR? You mentioned that Citrix didn’t work out for you. How come you didn’t go with Microsoft?

Then he downloaded the free version of VMware and tried the same thing on that. We got it up in two or three days.

Chambers: We looked at one of their products first. We've used the Virtual PC and Virtual Server products. Once you start looking at and evaluating theirs, it’s a little more difficult setup. It runs well, but at that time, I believe it was 2008, they didn’t have anything like the vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) that I could find. It was a bit slower. All around, the product just wasn’t as good as the VMware product was.

Moudry: I remember when William was loading it. I think he spent probably about 30 days loading Microsoft and he got a couple of machines running on it. It was probably about two or three machines on each host. I thought, "Man, this is pretty cool." But then he downloaded the free version of VMware and tried the same thing on that. We got it up in two or three days?

Chambers: I think it was three days to get the host loaded and then re-center all the products, and then it was great.

Moudry: Then he said that it was a little bit more expensive, but then we weighed out all the cost of all the hardware that we were going to have to spend with Microsoft. He loaded the VMware and he put about 10 VMs on one host.

Chambers: At that time, yeah.

Increased performance

Moudry: Yeah, it was running great. It was awesome. I couldn’t believe that that we could get that much performance from one machine. You'd think that running 10 servers, you would get the most performance. I couldn’t believe that those 10 servers were running just as fast on one server that they did on 10.

Chambers: That was another key benefit. The footprint of ESXi was somewhat smaller than a Microsoft.

Moudry: It used the memory so much more efficiently.

Gardner: So these are the things that are super-important to SMBs, when you’ve got a free version to try. It's the ease of installation, higher degree of automation, particularly when it came to multiple products, and then that all important footprint, the cost of hardware and then the maintenance and skills that go along with that. So that sounds like a pretty compelling case for SMB choice.

Before we move on, you mentioned vSphere, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, and View. Is that it? Are you up to the latest versions of those? What do you actually have in place and running?

Chambers: We’ve got both in production right now, vCenter 4.1, and vCenter 5.0. We’re migrating from 4.1 to 5.0. Instead of doing the traditional in-place upgrade, we’ve got it set up to take a couple of hosts out of the production environment, build them new from scratch, and then just migrate VMs to it in the server environment.

It went by so fast that it just happened that way. We were ahead of schedule on our time-frames and ahead on all of our budget numbers.

It's the same thing with the View environment. We’ve got enough hosts so we can take a couple out, build the new environment, and then just start migrating users to it.

Gardner: As I understand, you went to 99.999 percent virtualization in three months, is that correct?

Chambers: Yes.

Gardner: Was that your time-table, or did that happen faster than you expected?

Chambers: It happened much quicker than we thought. Once we did a few of the conversions, of the physical servers that we had, and it went by so fast that it just happened that way. We were ahead of schedule on our time-frames and ahead on all of our budget numbers. Once we got everything in our physical production environment virtualized, then we could start building new virtual servers to replace the ones that we had converted, just for better performance.

Gardner: So that's where you can bring more of those green elements, blades and so forth, which you mentioned is an important angle here. Of course you’re doing this for DR, but the process of moving from physical to virtual can be challenging for some folks. There are disruptions along the way. Did any of your workers seem put out, or were you able to do this without too much of disruption in terms of the migration process?

Without disruption

Chambers: We were able to do it without disruption, and that was one of the better things that happened. We could convert a physical server during the day, while people were still using it, or create that VM for it. Then, at night, we took the physical down and brought the virtual up, and they never knew it.

Gardner: So this is an instance where being an SMB works in your favor, because a large organization has to flip the switch on massive data centers. It's a little bit more involved. Sometimes weekends or even weeks are involved. So that’s good.

How about some help? Did you have any assistance in terms of a systems integrator, professional services, or anything along those lines?

Chambers: On the things that we’ve built here, we like to have other people come in and look at it and make sure we did it properly. So we’ll have an evaluation of it, after we build it and get everything in place.

Gardner: It sounds like you’re pretty complete though. That’s impressive. Another thing that I hear in the market is that when people make this move to virtualization and then they bring in the full DR capabilities, they see sort of a light bulb go on. "Wow. I can move my organization around, not just physically but I have more choices."

We’re going from a DR model to a high-availability business continuity, just to make sure everything is up all the time.

Some people are calling this cloud, as they’re able to move things around and think about a hybrid model, where they have some on their premises or in their own control, and then they outsource in some fashion to others. Now that you've done this, has this opened your eyes to some other possibilities, and what does that mean for you as an IT organization?

Chambers: It did exactly that. We’re going from a DR model to a high-availability business continuity, just to make sure everything is up all the time.

Moudry: That’s our next project. We’re taking what we did in the past and going to the next level, because right now we have it to where we have to fail over. We’re doing it like a SAN replication and we have to do a failover to another site.

William is trying to get that to more of a high-availability, where we just bring it down here and bring it up there, and it's a lot less downtime. So we’re working on phase two of the process now.

Gardner: All right. When you say here and near, I think you're talking about Houston and then Austin. Are those your two sites?

Moving to colos

Moudry: Right now it’s Houston and San Antonio, but we are trying to move -- we are moving all of our equipment to colos and we are going to be in Phoenix and Houston. So all the structure will be in colos, Houston, and Phoenix.

Gardner: So that’s even another layer of protection, wider geographic spread, and just reducing your risk in general. Let’s take a moment and look at what you’ve done and see in a bit more detail what it’s gotten for you. Return on investment (ROI), do you have any sense, having gone through this, what you are doing now that perhaps covered the cost of doing it in the first place?

Moudry: We spent about $350,000 a year in our past DR solution. We didn’t renew that, and the VMware DR paid for itself in the year.

Gardner: So you were able to recover your cost pretty quickly, and then you’ve got ongoing lower costs?

Moudry: Well, we are not buying equipment like we used to. We had 70 servers and four racks. It compressed down to one rack. How many blades are we running, William?

We're working with automation. We're getting less of a footprint for our employees. You just don’t hire as many.

Chambers: We're running 12 blades, and the per year maintenance cost on every server that we had compared to what we have now is 10 percent now of what it was.

Gardner: I suppose this all opens up more capacity, so that you can add on more data and more employees. You can grow, but without necessarily running out of capacity. So that's another benefit.

Moudry: We can probably do that, if we needed employees, but we're working with automation. We're getting less of a footprint for our employees. You just don’t hire as many.

Gardner: As you pursue colos, then you’ve got somebody else. They can worry about the air-conditioning, protection, security, and so forth. So that’s a little less burden for you.

Moudry: That’s the whole idea, for sure.

Gardner: How about some other metrics of success? Has this given you some agility now. Maybe your business folks come down and say, "We’d like you to run a different application," or "We're looking to do something additional to what we have in the past?" You can probably adapt to that pretty quickly.

Copying the template

Moudry: Making new servers is nothing. William has a template. He just copies it and renames it.

Chambers: The deployment of new ones is 20 minutes. Then, we’ve got our development people who come down and say, "I need a server just like the production server to do some testing on before we move that into production." That takes 10 minutes. All I have to do is clone that production server and set it up for them to use for development. It’s so fast and easy that they can get their work done much quicker.

Moudry: Rather than loading the Windows disk and having to load a server and get it all patched up.

Chambers: It gives you a like environment. In the past, where they tested on a test server you built, that’s not exactly the same as the production server. They could have bugs that they didn’t even know about yet, and that just cuts down on the development time just a lot.

Gardner: And so you're able to say yes, instead of, "Get in line behind everybody else." That’s a nice thing to do.

Chambers: Yes.

Gardner: Any advice for folks who are looking at the same type of direction, higher virtualization, gaining the benefits of DR’s result and then perhaps having more of that agility and flexibility. What might you have learned in hindsight that you could share with some other folks?

We’ve got a lot of people working at home now, just because of the View environment and things like that.

Chambers: We’ve attended several conferences and forums. I think there’s more caution that people are using. They want to get into virtualization but they're just not sure how it runs.

If you are going to use it, then get in and start using it on a small basis. Just to do a proof of concept, check performance, do all the due diligence that you need, and get into it. It will really pay off in the end.

Moudry: Have a change control system that monitors what you change. When we first went over there, William was testing out the VMs, and I couldn’t believe, as I was saying earlier, how fast it is. We have people who are on the phones. They're quoting insurance. They have to have the speed. If it hesitates, and that customer on the phone takes longer to give our people the information and our people has hard time quoting it, we’re going to lose the business.

When William put some of these packages over to the VM software, and it was not only running as fast, but it was running faster on the VM than it was on a hard box. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe how fast it was.

Chambers: And there was another thing that we saw. We’ve got a lot of people working at home now, just because of the View environment and things like that. I think we’ve kind of neglected our inside people, because they'd rather work in a View environment, because it's so much faster than sitting on a local desktop.

Backbone speed

Moudry: Well, the View, and all that being on the chassis itself is all backbone speed. When a person is working on the View, he is working right next to servers, rather than going through Cat 5 cable and through switches. He is on the backbone.

When somebody works at home, they're at lightning speeds. Upstairs is a ghost town now, because everybody wants to work from home. That’s part of our DR also. The model is, "We have a disaster here. You go work from home." That means we don’t have to put people into offices anywhere, and with the Voice over IP, it's like their call-center. They just call from home.

Gardner: I hope it never comes to this, but if there is a natural disaster type of issue, they could just pick up and drive 100 miles to where it's good. They’re up and running and they’ve got a mobile office.

Moudry: The way we did it, if they want to go 100 miles and check into hotel, they can work from the hotel That’s no problem.

Gardner: Let's look to the future unintended consequences that sometimes kick in on this. I've heard from other folks, and it sounds like with these View desktops that you’re going to have some compliance and security benefits, better control over data. Any metrics or payback along those lines?

There is no need for anybody to take our data out of this data center, because they can work from View anywhere they want to.

Moudry: We just were going over some insurance policies and stuff like that for digital data protection. One of the biggest problems that they were mentioning is employees putting data on laptops and then the laptop goes away, get stolen or whatever. There is no need for anybody to take our data out of this data center, because they can work from View anywhere they want to. Anywhere in the world, they can work from View. There's no reason to take the data anywhere. So that’s a security benefit.

Chambers: They can work from different devices now, too. I know we’ve got laptops out there, iPads, different type of mobile devices, and it's all secure.

Gardner: Any other future directions that you could share with us? You've told us quite a bit about what your plans are, colos and further data center locations, perhaps moving more towards mobile device support. Did we miss anything? What's the next step?

vMotion between sites

Moudry: As we said before we’re colo-ing VMware, we’re not able to vMotion between sites, but we’re kind of waiting for VMware to improve that a little bit. They'll probably come in down the road a little. But, that would probably be the next thing that I’d want is the vMotion between sites.

Gardner: And why is that important to you?

Moudry: Well, because it's a high-availability, they meet a true high-availability, because you just vMotion all your stuff to the other side and nobody even knows.

We’ve vMotioned servers between the hosts, and nobody even knows they moved. It's up all the time. Nobody even knows that we changed hardware on them. So that’s a great thing.

Gardner: It's just coming out of the cloud.

Moudry: Yeah.

Chambers: Sometimes, there may be a need to shut down an entire rack of equipment in one of our colos. Then we’d have to migrate everything.

Gardner: So an insurance policy for an insurance provider?

Chambers: Yes.

Moudry: Yeah.

Gardner: I'm afraid we’ll have to leave it there, gentlemen. We’ve been talking about how insurance wholesaler Myron Steves & Co. has developed and implemented an impressive IT DR strategy We’ve seen how an even small-to-medium-sized business can create business continuity for its operations, and make IT more efficient and agile to its business users. I’d like to thank our guests, Tim Moudry, Associate Director of IT at Myron Steves & Co. Thanks so much, Tim.

Moudry: Thank you.

Gardner: And also, William Chambers, IT Operations Manager there at Myron Steves. Thank you, William.

Chambers: You're very welcome, thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again to our audience for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how small-and-medium businesses can improve disaster recovery through virtualization, while reaping additional benefits. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Expert Chat on How HP Ecosystem Provides Holistic Support for VMware Virtualized IT Environments

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP Expert Chat series on the best practices for service and support of highly virtualized environments.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

Dana Gardner: Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created from a recent HP Expert Chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support.

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better holistic approach to IT support remediation. That’s why HP has made the service and support of global virtualization market leader VMware a top priority.

And while the technology to support and fix these virtualized environments is essential, it’s the people, skills, and knowledge to manage these systems that provide the most decisive determinants of ongoing performance success.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. To learn more, I recently moderated a discussion with Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution and Quality for VMware Products at HP. Cindy has 27-plus years of experience with HP and 8-plus years supporting VMware specifically. [Disclosure: HP and VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

In our discussion, you’ll hear the latest recommendations for how IT support should be done. As part of our chat, we’re also be joined by two other HP experts: Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. Our discussion begins with an overview from me of the virtualization market and user adoption trends.

Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security, performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across the globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out are up at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

These are all reasons why it’s no longer just about servers, but has to be something that includes how you're looking at IT in general. It’s also a cultural issue. It’s about managing complexity when you get to that 20 percent or 30 percent level, and not letting the value and benefits for virtualization be eroded by a management issue, or complexity around management.

So how to take advantage of the best things about virtualization? Part of that means allowing your IT team to have access to other experienced support teams, from HP and VMware, around the world, 24×7, to help keep systems up and running. Such support also allows your IT team to progress, to learn as they go, and to be able to take advantage of more virtualization benefits over time.

Another thing to consider is that the way your organizations is perceived, not only your IT organization, but your total company, is so dependent now on how your systems perform. It’s really impossible to separate a business from its IT performance. In many cases, your applications are the business. How you present on performance is, in fact, how you present your sense of competency, capability, and your overall brand.

We encourage people, as they pursue more virtualization, to recognize that their web applications, their mobile applications or e-commerce activities all are running on a combination of virtual and a physical infrastructure. These need to be tuned, and performance needs to be considered on an ongoing basis.

Expert panel

So how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an insurance policy around service and support? That’s what the HP experts are going to help us understand.

I’d like to introduce one of our chief experts: Cindy Manderson, a consultant for complex problem resolution at HP with 27 years of experience. She’s been supporting VMware products and the ecosystem of VMware for eight years, when VMware came on the scene in a big way.

Cindy is going to provide more insights into how mission critical support works in virtualization, how HP and VMware are working together, and what the synergy between their products amounts to. Cindy, tell us about yourself.

Manderson: Thanks, Dana. I've been in the multi-vendor space for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all with HP.

In 2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually became alliance partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and thus began our support partnership with them. It would only extend recent in 2005, we also became an OEM.

We have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're also the largest global VMware off-site training center

We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP also does education on these technologies as well. We’ve trained over 20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had this very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have support teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same level of training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to their facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further do this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware, we are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the other teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and storage, and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate with them and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the customer's whole environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally, you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end solution and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a problem, they can either call in at their local region telephone number -- whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer. They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool, where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2 engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them before they even get to a point of escalation.

If the case does end up needing escalation, chances are this person that they're already collaborating with will end up taking that case.

If the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the case. That saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of server you have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the problem there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as we can continue to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the hardware teams, too, so we can look at the server and make sure that the environment is what we need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we can also go to Level 3 with VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We have a great relationship with the folks that we work alongside with and would escalate calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into Level 1 at VMware because we’ve already done all that work, and we are a service partner. They'll go right up to our peers over at VMware and then we work together, while always owning the solution that we provide back to the customer.

Gardner: And let’s look at this also from the perspective of globalization. So many organizations now just don’t stop in the afternoon and go home. The ongoing problems can’t just be left until the next day. How does it work on a continuity basis, time zone to time zone, region to region?

Manderson: Another part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that we have a single customer database. I can give an example. A call came into our Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the European folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French engineer could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were offline.

HP Virtual Room

So we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we had to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready to home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we placed a call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next day. So our counterparts in European support teams picked that up and worked with the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what happened and prevent it in the future.

Gardner: You have a lot of examples at your disposal, I can tell. You've been through a lot with different customers. What sticks out in your mind as a particularly complex engagement that ended up turning out pretty well that might illustrate a bit more about what this takes and what’s involved?

Manderson: A lot of examples I've given have all been involved with the Level 2 support organizations, the HP server storage hardware, and also engaging VMware. There was another case.

Many of the examples that I've given so far are pretty much based on individual incidents. You call in and you get connected to the next available resource.

We have another process in HP that can actually go with top organizations, our escalation manager process. I was lead source for a particular case where we had a field team assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware, servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues by trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware at one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local office to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the actual escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track. We knew where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case, but we did finally find was that the customer was on the technological edge, and the "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Many of the examples that I've given so far are pretty much based on individual incidents. You call in and you get connected to the next available resource.

We have another level, mission-critical support, and we have several offerings in this phase. Essentially, it’s more personalized. We know who you are. We already know your environment. You’re going to find a technical account manager.

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

Site visits

For example, Pat Lampert is a technical account manager and does site visits. The technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re aware of the environment. We have the information of your environment documented into the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now what kind of server is this? What’s the firmware?" We know this because we already have it documented. We could be calling them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already which know VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a new build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further incidents, because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your business.

Gardner: Okay, none of these organizations are the same. They have difference legacy, different installations, and different physical-virtualization mixes. How do you manage that sort of complex combination, as well as customize the service delivery, too?

Manderson: Actually, we have a team, our customer service team. Anything that's been not already in our pre-packaged service offerings, we can add. For example, a customer may need their own 800 number for when they log cases. And they may need just an email sent out.

Pat Lampert is one of our our custom technical account managers. He does have additional requirements and possibilities for some of the customers that he is assigned. This way, we can personalize the businesses even more and focus on choosing that business model.

Our critical and independent support includes onsite resources from HP that also include a lot of proactive support.

Gardner: Tell me about the mission critical offerings, and then the whole portfolio.

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical. In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set of folks who would actually look at not just the reactive support and even some of the proactive, but how actually your entire business is running according to the ITIL standard.

That is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with you on a type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our critical and independent support includes onsite resources from HP that also include a lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more focused on specific management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select, a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some consulting time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and migration. You may need some performance or you may need some type of environmental assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services, how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is out on our website. They saw that the customers who have the mission-critical services, reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment, and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the study. It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these support processes can certainly help you reduce that downtime.

Gardner: This support extends across a variety of different areas. We looked at the mission critical, we looked at those complex issues, the need for customization. Can you give a quick overview of some of the additional support services?

Manderson: We have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support. That can notify HP that you're having a disk drive failure. Or we will call you and say that we know that disk drive is failing, or something on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can even take that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating system. We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't care about the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding that automation to other operating systems. We have installation and startup services that we can actually go out and set up and configure the hardware and software at a site.

We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't care about the vendor.

So we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and running.

Gardner: We've talked about the need for ecosystem-level view on virtualization. We looked at how HP and VMware have been working together very closely for a number of years, talked about some of the services available, why the experts’ personal experience and knowledge is essential, and the ability then for them to react toward something that’s unique that they haven’t seen before, bring in the expertise when they need it, act as a adjunct to the teams at the sites of these organizations.

And we have heard a little bit about some of the payback, 400 percent ROI, according to IDC. Now let's take this back to the experts themselves. We've heard from Cindy, but there are others involved. Hi, Sumithra.

Reddy: Dana, I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically, HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers. It then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also adds any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

And one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware image is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5. As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would do is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because starting with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to understand what the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done, hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Gardner: Pat, tell us about some of the other questions and your answers please.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the added value of getting support directly from HP. It was partly addressed during the presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware does have a fine support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP, in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also offers our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems based on HP Blades. The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware product, but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in the proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with running vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that, we have a partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for support through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we have to go to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One other question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a number of different types of servers already in those configurations, and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: Back to you Sumithra. Do you have any thoughts on some of the questions that really caught your attention that you think are representative of what our audience is thinking and feeling today?

Reddy: One little question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death." Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to rule out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to see if it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we engage the hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail with Sumithra’s comment there, one of the questions I get frequently is what to do if you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs, and that seems to be almost more common than the Purple Screen of Death. Some customers are't aware that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with the ESX host software.

Gardner: Pat, we have time for one more.

Lampert: One question that came up ahead of time is what HP suggests as far as getting a handle on our inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in field testing some new tools from HP that will be available in January and February regarding vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade and Firmware Analysis that takes into account the VMware environment on our Blade systems which we are working on having ready soon. We have just completed field tests.

And the second is a really nifty Inventory Report HP has just put together. We're just completing field tests on that now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead of time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold as a service to customers.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP.

The report is really quite nice, with all sorts of charts and showing availability of machines and availability of memory and also disk space. It's a very nice report. You should be able to get a sample, if you're interested.

Gardner: Well, that about wraps up our hour. I really want to thank our audience for joining us. I hope you found it valuable.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created from a recent HP expert chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support.

I would like to also thank our guests, Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex Problem Resolution & Quality for VMware Products at HP; Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader at HP, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP Virtualization Engineer. And to our audience, again, thanks to you all for listening and come back next time.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP Expert Chat series on the best practices for service and support of highly virtualized environments. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Redefine the potential of your virtualization investments.
View the full Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.

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Case Study: How SEGA Europe Uses VMware to Standardize Cloud Environment for Globally Distributed Game Development

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how SEGA Europe has moved to a more secure and scalable VMware cloud solution for its worldwide development efforts.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how a major game developer in Europe is successfully leveraging the hybrid cloud model.

We’ll learn how SEGA Europe is standardizing its cloud infrastructure across its on-premises operations, as well as with a public cloud provider. The result is a managed and orchestrated hybrid environment to test and develop multimedia games, one that dynamically scales productively to the many performance requirements at hand.

We’re joined by a systems architect with SEGA in London to learn more about how the hybrid approach to multiple, complementary cloud instances is meeting SEGA’s critical development requirements in a new way. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Please join me now in welcoming Francis Hart, Systems Architect at SEGA Europe. Welcome to the podcast, Francis.

Francis Hart: Hi.

Gardner: We’re all very familiar with the amazing video games that are being created nowadays. And SEGA of course is particularly well-known for the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise going back a number of years, and I have to tell you, Francis, my son is a big fan of those games.

But I'm curious about how, behind the scenes, these games are made. How they come into being and what are some of the critical requirements that you have from a systems architecture perspective when developing these games?

Hart: We have a lot of development studios across the world. We're working on multiple projects. We need to ensure that we supply them with a highly scalable and reliable solution in order to test, develop, and produce the game and the code in time.

Gardner: And how many developers are you working with there at SEGA Europe?

Hart: We have a number of different development studios. We’re probably looking at thousands of individual developers across the world.

Gardner: For those folks who are not familiar with the process, there is the creation of the code, there is the test and debug, and builds. It's quite complicated. There's a lot going on, many different moving parts. How did you start approaching that from your IT environment, from building the right infrastructure to support that?

Targeting testing

Hart: One of the first areas we targeted very early on was the last process in those steps, the testing, arguably one of the most time-consuming processes within the development cycle. It happens pretty much all the way through as well to ensure that the game itself behaves as it should, it’s tested, and the customer gets the end-user experience they require.

The biggest technical goal that we had for this is being able to move large amounts of data, un-compiled code, from different testing offices around the world to the staff. Historically we had some major issues in securely moving that data around, and this is what we started looking into cloud solutions for this.

Gardner: How did you use to do it? What was the old fashion way?

Hart: For very, very large game builds, and we're talking game builds above 10 gigabytes, it ended up being couriered within the country and then overnight file transfer outside of the country. So, very old school methods.

We needed both to secure that up to make sure we understood where the game builds were, and also to understand exactly which version each of the testing offices was using. So it’s gaining control, but also providing more security.

Gardner: Clearly one of the requirements here is to manage large files rapidly across geographic distances, but with security and management control, governance, and so forth. But as I understand, you're also dealing with this sort of peak-and-trough issue about the infrastructure itself. You need to ramp up a lot of servers to do the build, but then they sit there essentially unproductive between the builds. How did you flatten that out or manage the requirements around the workload support?

We work on the idea of having a central platform for a lot of these systems. Using virtualization to do that allowed us to scale off at certain times.

Hart: Typically, in the early stages of development, there is a fair amount of testing going on, and it tends to be quite small -- the number of staff involved in it and the number of build iterations. Going on, when the game reaches to the end of its product life-cycle, we’re talking multiple game iterations a day and the game size has gotten very large at that point. The number of people involved in the testing to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped on date is into the hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Gardner: How has virtualization and moving your workloads into different locations evolved over the years?

Hart: We work on the idea of having a central platform for a lot of these systems. Using virtualization to do that allowed us to scale off at certain times. Historically, we always had an on-premise VMware platform to do this. Very recently, we’ve been looking at ways to use that resource within a cloud to cut down from some of Capex loading but also remain a little bit more agile with some of the larger titles, especially online games that are coming around.

Gardner: Right. So we’re seeing a lot more of the role-play games (RPG) types of games, games themselves in the cloud. That must influence what you're doing in terms of thinking about your future direction.

Hart: Absolutely. We’ve been looking at things like the hybrid cloud model with VMware as a development platform for our developers. That's really what we're working on now. We've got a number of games in the pipeline that have been developed on the hybrid cloud platform. It gives the developers a platform that is exactly the same and mirrored to what it would eventually be in the online space through ISPs like Colt, which should be hosting the virtual cloud platform.

Gardner: So if the end destination for the runtime, or the operational runtime, for the game is going to be the cloud, it makes sense to live "of, for, and by" the cloud, I suppose. It’s more complementary. It’s always going to be there, right?

Gaining cost benefits

Hart: Yes. And one of the benefits we're seeing in the VMware offering is that regardless of what data center in the world is the standard platform, it also allows us to leverage multiple ISPs, and hopefully gain some cost benefits from that.

Gardner: Francis, tell me a little bit about the pilot project. No one is going to jump up and put their mission-critical activities into a cloud environment, especially a hybrid environment, overnight. So the crawl-walk-run approach seems to be the most prudent way. Tell me a little bit about what your goals were and what you've been able to attain even in a pilot setting?

Hart: Very early on we were in discussions with Colt and also VMware to understand what technology stack they were bringing into the cloud. We started doing a proof of concept with VMware and a professional services company, and together we were able to come over a proof of concept to distribute our game testing code, which previously was a very old-school distribution system. So anything better would improve the process.

There wasn't too much risk to the company. So we saw the opportunity to have a hybrid cloud set up to allow us to have an internal cloud system to distribute the codes to the majority of UK game testers and to leverage high bandwidth between all of our sites.

For the game testing studios around Europe and the world, we could use a hosted version of the same service which was up on the Colt Virtual Cloud Director (VCD) platform to supply this to trusted testing studios.

Doing this allows us to manage it at one location and simply clone the same system to another cloud data center.

Gardner: When you approach this hybrid cloud model, it’s one thing to be able to technically do that, to have the standardization and to have the products in place that will support the workloads and the virtualization continuity, the similar environment. But what about managing that? What about having a view into what’s going on so that you know what aspects of the activity and requirements are being met and where? It must involve quite a bit of management?

Hart: Yes. Also the virtual cloud environment of vCloud Director has a web portal that allows you to manage a lot of this configuration in a central way. We’re also using VMware Cloud Connector, which is a product that allows you to move the apps between different cloud data centers. And doing this allows us to manage it at one location and simply clone the same system to another cloud data center.

In that regard, the configuration very much was in a single place for us in the way that we designed the proof of concept. It actually helped things, and the previous process wasn’t ideal anyway. So it was a dramatic improvement.

Gardner: Well, let’s dig into that a bit. What were some of the metrics of success, even on your pilots? I understand that you’re going to be expanding on that, but are there data points that we can look to whether it’s reduction in cost for servers, operation, security, time to development and test? What were some of the salient paybacks of doing development in this manner?

Hart: One of the immediate benefits was around the design process. It's very obvious that we were tightening up security within our build delivery to the testing studios. Nothing was with a courier on a bike anymore, but within a secured transaction between the two offices.

Risk greatly reduced

Also from a security perspective, we understood exactly what game assets and builds were in each location. So it really helped the product development teams to understand what was where and who was using what, and so from a risk point of view it’s greatly reduced.

In terms of stats and the amount of data throughput, it’s pretty large, and we’ve been moving terabytes pretty much weekly nowadays. Now we’re going completely live with the distribution network.

So it’s been a massive success. All of the UK testing studios are using the build delivery system day to day, and for the European ones we’ve got about half the testing studios on board that build delivery system now, and it’s transparent to them.

Gardner: Francis, in moving to a hybrid environment, in practical terms, was there anything that appeared, that crept in, that you weren’t anticipating? Was there something about this that caught you by surprise -- either good or bad?

Hart: Not particularly. VMware was very good at allowing us to understand the technology and that's one of the benefits of working with a professional services reseller. In terms of gotchas, there weren't too many. There were a lot of good surprises that came up and allowed us to open the door to a lot of other VMware technologies.

There were a lot of good surprises that came up and allowed us to open the door to a lot of other VMware technologies.

Now, we're also looking at alternating a lot of processes within vCenter Orchestrator and other VMware products. They really gave us a good stepping stone into the VMware catalogue, rather than just vSphere, which we were using previously. That was very handy for us.

Gardner: I’d like to just pause here for a second. Your use of vSphere -- and I believe you’re on 4.1 if my notes are correct -- has gotten you to a fairly high level of virtualization. That must have been an important stepping stone to be able to have the dynamic ability to ramp up and down your environments, your support infrastructure, but also skills. I imagine there must have been a comfort zone with virtualization that you needed to have in order to move into the cloud level, too.

Hart: Absolutely. We already have a fair footprint in Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it was a massive skill jump that we needed to train members of the staff in order to use that environment. With the VMware environment, as you said, we already have a large amount of skill set using vSphere. We have a large team that supports our corporate infrastructure and we've actually got VMware in our co-located public environment as well. So it was very, very assuring that the skills were immediately transferable.

Gardner: Let’s get back to what you’re going to be doing, now that this pilot has been successful. You’ve had some success with meeting your requirements, also getting some benefits that you weren't anticipating and that all important security control and governance aspect. What’s the next step? Where did you go with your initial stepping stone into hybrid cloud? How are you going to get into that run mode now that you've sort of walked and crawled?

Game release

Hart: As I mentioned before, the first part was dealing with the end of the process, and that was the testing and the game release process. Now, we’re going to be working back from that. The next big area that we’re actively involved in is getting our developers to develop online games within the hybrid environment.

So they’re designing the game and the game’s back-end servers to be optimal within the VMware environment. And then, also pushing from staging to live is a very simple process using the Cloud Connector.

Gardner: Well, that sounds a lot like what we know in the business as platform as a service (PaaS) where you are actually accomplishing much, if not all, of the development, test and deploy cycle -- the life-cycle of the applications in the cloud.

Hart: Absolutely. We're restructuring and redesigning the IT systems within SEGA to be more of a development operations team to provide a service to the developers and to the company.

Gardner: Great. I really appreciate your sharing your story with us, Francis. Now that you've done this a bit, any words of wisdom, 20/20 hindsight, that you might share with others who are considering moving more aggressively into private cloud, hybrid cloud, and ultimately perhaps the full PaaS value?

The next big area that we’re actively involved in is getting our developers to develop online games within the hybrid environment.

Hart: Just get some hands-on experience and play with the cloud stack from VMware. It’s inexpensive to have a go and just get to know the technology stack.

Gardner: Thanks. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how a major game developer, SEGA, is leveraging the hybrid cloud model using the VMware cloud stack.

I’d like to thank our guest, Francis Hart, System Architect at SEGA Europe, based in London. Thanks again so much, Francis.

Hart: Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to our audience for joining us as well, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how SEGA Europe has moved to a more secure and scalable VMware cloud solution for its worldwide development efforts. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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