VMWARE CASE STUDY

Meralco Powers Up a New Model for Customer Service Excellence

INDUSTRY The Philippine electricity distributor needed to transform Utilities its IT function from a cost center to a driver of innovation, operational excellence and cost-effectiveness. Virtualizing its LOCATION datacenters has enabled Meralco to cut the time needed to The deliver applications such as a new pre-paid retail electricity system, automate key infrastructure processes, and ensure KEY CHALLENGES • Boost the effectiveness of IT business continuity in the event of a major datacenter outage. service delivery • Achieve greater flexibility to support business growth • Streamline disaster recovery processes Meralco is the largest electricity distributor in the Philippines with a franchise area of 9,337 square kilometers, covering 25 percent of the country’s total population. SOLUTION Implement VMware The company provides power to about “As in most organizations, the IT virtualization as the foundation 5.4 million residential, commercial and function was generally viewed as a cost of a more effective IT delivery industrial customers in 34 cities and 77 center within Meralco,” said Marthyn model with automated disaster municipalities, including Metro , the Cuan, Meralco Vice President and Chief recovery, infrastructure provinces of , and , Information Officer. “We wanted to management and efficient and parts of the provinces of , change this perception by transforming operations , and . our IT to drive innovation, operational excellence and cost-efficiency.” Even after operating for more than BUSINESS BENEFITS 100 years, Meralco continues to pursue “However, our traditional approach domestic and international growth was to run at least one server for every • Reduced IT implementation through investments and joint ventures. application,” said Cuan. “This meant some cycle times from months to Combined with the continuing rise in servers were not fully utilized. We also days consumer and business demand for found it difficult to scale resources up and • Improved disaster recovery power, this strategy will drive Meralco’s down as our computing needs changed.” expansion in coming years. objectives “It usually took months to purchase, install and configure servers before they • Boosted the management The Challenge could become fully functional,” he added. and utilization of IT assets Needing to adapt to the changing Meralco also wanted to implement business landscape and find new ways disaster recovery for its critical of providing innovative and high-quality infrastructure. “It took us up to four hours service, Meralco had to take a new to fully restore a system or application approach to deploying and managing its after a failure,” said Cuan. ”We realized core IT systems. The company’s legacy IT that in the event of an outage, we could infrastructure had adequately supported lose as much as an hour of data from our business activities, but it could not deliver real-time systems.” the required flexibility and efficiency as operations expanded and market demand increased. VMWARE CASE STUDY

The organization’s existing process also By designing an optimal architecture for “We want to deliver included manual steps that increased the virtualized environment, applying IT services that drive the risk of human error compromising best practices and consulting with innovation, operational recovery when a catastrophic outage Meralco’s technology and business teams, excellence and cost- occurred, while infrastructure VMware ensured the infrastructure met efficiency in support of management and maintenance tasks Meralco’s longer-term business and Meralco’s overall objective were laborious and prevented the IT team technical requirements. from focusing on higher-value work such of further improving For example, VMware used its deep as business projects. customer service.” technical knowledge to intelligently The Solution size each virtual machine in a highly available cluster, reducing the likelihood The need to reduce implementation cycle Marthyn Cuan of oversubscribing the memory and CPU Vice President and times prompted Meralco to develop and resources allocated to each machine. Chief Information Officer adopt a new IT service delivery model. Meralco “We believed this model would provide The environment also supports Meralco’s the flexibility we needed to support our longer-term move to an active-active growing business,” said Cuan. architecture, where the virtualized infrastructure is effectively stretched After conducting a thorough business across the organization’s datacenters. and technical evaluation, Meralco decided This delivers efficiency and performance to adopt a virtualized IT infrastructure to benefits to Meralco while ensuring support the new approach. the organization continues to meet Meralco’s IT team reviewed options regulatory demands. available in the market before developing Meralco has built on its initial VMware a plan based on VMware products, project by deploying VMware vCenter™ including the VMware® vSphere® server Operations Management Suite™ to virtualization platform. “We acknowledge gain deep visibility of its virtualized VMware’s strong industry track record infrastructure and take advantage of the in the area of virtualization,” said Cuan. product’s automated analytics. “Meralco has been a user of VMware since 2008, albeit on a small scale. “What interested us most was the ability to go beyond monitoring the health of “Our evaluation process showed that our virtual machines and their hosts,” VMware was the most cost-effective said Cuan. “We wanted to improve our option, as the skill sets required to deploy capacity planning, risk assessment and and run the technology had become overall efficiency.” mainstream among IT professionals. On the disaster recovery front, the “This gave us confidence in the results of team implemented VMware vCenter™ our investment.” Site Recovery Manager™ to automate Meralco partnered with VMware to the movement of workloads between develop and implement the virtualized datacenters should problems arise. “We infrastructure. After the customer and had to consider the critical movement of vendor completed preliminary project loads from one server or one chassis to work, VMware deployed new blade another,” said Cuan. servers, connected them to a networked “If we ever lose our primary site, we storage system, deployed the virtualized want to be able to recover from another infrastructure and packed up Meralco’s datacenter without major business old servers in a single afternoon. disruption.”

The vendor completed the work Key applications moved into the new without incurring any downtime for infrastructure during the first phase users. Meralco’s IT team then added of the virtualization project included new equipment and virtual machines in new customer management, asset an iterative process over the next few management, pre-paid solutions and months without disrupting the company’s mobile workforce management systems. operations. These now run in 193 virtual machines on The parties completed the project in the about 50 hosts. second half of 2012. “Our IT team worked with VMware to ensure the environment supported our strict regulatory and customer service demands,” said Cuan.

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Meralco plans to load another group our customers by providing options “The flexibility and of applications into the virtualized that are supported by technological resilience provided by our infrastructure over the next few months. advancements.” The company recently moved its new virtualized infrastructure Future Plans means we can be more email system across to the virtualized responsive to business infrastructure and planned to do the Building on the success of the requirements and make same with its collaboration software. virtualization project, Meralco plans more effective use of our Doing this will further reduce its physical to use the new infrastructure to offer IT assets.” server numbers by another 15–20 technology services more effectively to internal customers. The IT department percent. “Currently, we have virtualized plans to develop a rate card that Marthyn Cuan at least 50 percent of our infrastructure Vice President and and we aim to increase this to 90 percent lists costs associated with various Chief Information Officer during the next 18 months,” Cuan said. components such as compute resources Meralco and storage. Business Results & Benefits “We are moving the budgets associated With phase one of the virtualized with IT infrastructure to each business infrastructure in place, Meralco’s IT line so they have better visibility of the department has changed the way it costs associated with the hardware VMWARE FOOTPRINT supports the business, making it a more and software that is supporting their • VMware vSphere 5.1 with efficient, streamlined service delivery operations,” said Cuan. “This will make it ESXi operation. much more transparent so they can see how they are using IT resources.” • VMware vCenter Server The overall resilience and robustness of the company’s IT infrastructure has also The IT team is also further exploring • VMware vCenter Operations improved. Where previously it might have the potential of cloud environments Management Suite taken up to four hours to recover from an that could be built on the virtualized • VMware vCenter Site outage, the same process now takes just infrastructure. Eventually, Meralco Recovery Manager one hour. Potential data loss has been envisages having in place an reduced from up to one hour’s worth to infrastructure that can be quickly and APPLICATIONS VIRTUALIZED just 15 minutes’ worth. cost-effectively aligned to changing business requirements. • Customer records In addition, where once it would management have taken the team between 45 and “The VMware-based virtualized 60 days to provision a server to support infrastructure we now have in place • Asset management a new business requirement, this can now means we are well positioned to continue • Pre-paid solutions be completed within two weeks. Meralco to improve our operational efficiency as • Mobile workforce anticipates that later in 2014, this time well as the levels of service we provide to management frame will contract to mere days. our customers,” said Cuan. With many infrastructure and disaster PLATFORM recovery processes now automated, the • Cisco Unified Computing potential for human error to hamper or System (UCS) blade servers derail critical processes has been reduced and the IT team is now directing most • EMC VNX and Symmetrix of its energies to delivering higher value storage projects that benefit Meralco and its • Microsoft Windows Server, customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux “As we bring forward the development and release of projects, our customers benefit,” said Cuan. “For example, our new Prepaid Retail Electricity System (PRES) is giving our customers more options on how they can be billed and how they can pay, based on their lifestyle.

“This is just one example of how we help improve the standard of service our customers receive,” he added. “At the end of the day, we would like to empower

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