vmware case study

MicroStrategy sees macro shifts in productivity and efficiency from a virtualized cloud environment

Breaking the barriers of a physical infrastructure through private Industry and public clouds Technology Intelligence in business Location In the emerging frontiers of mobile, social and cloud, the business with the best insight into Tyson’s Corner, Virginia these markets wins. Companies looking to lead these markets need integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software, and MicroStrategy is the answer. MicroStrategy delivers enterprise software platforms for (BI), mobile intelligence, and social Key Challenges intelligence applications to some of the largest companies around the world. • Decentralized infrastructure for R&D and customer support Enterprise software companies like MicroStrategy need to continually deliver innovative products, support customers globally at the lowest operational costs and stay ahead of • Suboptimal provisioning of their competition—all at the same time. Time to market, customer support, retention and computer resources offerings all depend on the quality of IT and operational infrastructure. • Skyrocketing costs of Every day, millions of people make smarter decisions because of MicroStrategy. That means commercial public clouds MicroStrategy has to consistently make smarter, better decisions about how it works as a company, in order to better serve its customers. Solution MicroStrategy used VMware Business challenges vCloud Director to implement MicroStrategy needed a high-performance, flexible infrastructure to properly support its a flexible infrastructure for business and its customers. This involved a change to the way MicroStrategy works internally, private and public clouds that and a change in how it delivers analytics to its customers. improve operational efficiency, Internally, MicroStrategy faced infrastructure and operational challenges, including: keep pace with the growth of the business, and enable new, • Decentralized infrastructure for R&D and customer support more competitive product and • Suboptimal provisioning of computer resources service offerings. • Skyrocketing costs of commercial public clouds

MicroStrategy has a complex, follow-the-sun, 24/5 operational environment run by geographically Business Benefits diverse development teams. With hundreds of engineers in the , China, India and MicroStrategy’s cloud Europe, MicroStrategy needed more efficient machine procurement and provisioning to handle environments altered its global operations. The company also faced the issue of supplying resources to its rapidly business model, impacting increasing head count in a timely fashion. both its own processes and Because of ongoing growth, IT capacity was an issue. MicroStrategy needed to change the how it delivered solutions to way it operated to improve capacity utilization and management. customers: Additionally, its infrastructure impacted how MicroStrategy worked with customers. The • Provided more responsive traditional, resource-intensive environment meant long sales cycles for MicroStrategy, and support to their customers lengthy implementation processes for its customers. The implementation of these traditional • Expanded their environment environments took anywhere from nine to 18 months. Further, customers had to find and to accelerate sales implement their own hardware, which could take months. In other words, MicroStrategy’s business was held back by the physical world’s limitations. • Lowered the costs of storing, powering and maintaining physical servers vmware case study

In early 2011, these issues caused the company’s goals to shift. MicroStrategy completely “The business itself would not re-assessed its business needs and infrastructure during a four-month long evaluation. The be possible for us to deliver ultimate goal was to build a flexible and scalable infrastructure to support MicroStrategy’s in a cost-effective way if we increasing headcount and customer programs. didn’t have the virtualized With all these concerns in mind, MicroStrategy decided to build its own public and private infrastructure.” clouds for greater efficiency and performance. The company chose to design a common Alex Freixas, Vice President, reference architecture for both its private and public cloud offerings, so it could repurpose MicroStrategy Labs the same footprint in several datacenters around the world.

A perfect fit First, MicroStrategy had to virtualize its infrastructure. The mature, efficient cloud environment was necessary to deliver the heavy workloads of analytics services and meet high performance demands. MicroStrategy’s IT department then evangelized the need for an internal private cloud to its stakeholders and hundreds of technical workers worldwide to create awareness of this strategic initiative.

MicroStrategy underwent a thorough process to identify the best solution. “We were very selective on the products and hardware components that would help us build the cloud we needed,” said Alex Freixas, VP MicroStrategy Labs.

In-depth technical and cost analysis were critical in selecting the right technology partners for the virtual infrastructure’s storage, network and computing resources layers. MicroStrategy required security, performance, high availability, recoverability, and self-service capabilities from its partners. VMware vCloud® Director,™ VMware ESX® and VMware vCenter Server™ all delivered this performance and functionality. VMware® vShield App™ and VMware vShield Edge™ were instrumental in the implementation of a security model under multi-tenancy. In addition, the ability of vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (DRS) to balance workloads across all team members directly addressed its internal performance challenges while maximizing the utilization of resources. As a result, the IT team was able to give users self-provisioning abilities while maintaining centralized management.

MicroStrategy found value in VMware vCloud Director’s ease of use. MicroStrategy was able to unleash the power of the private cloud to virtually every employee in the company. In addition to ease of deployment, MicroStrategy found vCloud Director’s elasticity, flexibility to integrate geographically separated offices, support of both Windows and Linux and its cost-effectiveness as main reasons for choosing VMware. Over a hundred business partners and prospects are now able to self-deploy both its analytics offerings and business critical applications.

Once the MicroStrategy cloud reference architecture was designed and approved, it was released into production worldwide in less than 45 calendar days.

Shortly after deploying MicroStrategy’s private cloud, the company saw unprecedented high adoption. This led to an expansion of VMware into other parts of MicroStrategy’s business. The company then virtualized the technology and QA operations that ran over 200 Intel- based production servers. Now, the private cloud supports over 2,800 machines and hundreds of users worldwide.

Putting cloud to the test Analytics are arguably the most challenging enterprise workloads to process, and are typically associated with expensive, big iron solutions. To properly run analytics in real-time, analysts are required to pull in massive amounts of data. Queries without virtualization could take hours. With analytic workloads, performance and efficiency are key. MicroStrategy knew that VMware could deliver.

In 2010, VMware sponsored a Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark with ParAccel’s columnar database. The fully audited benchmark set a world record for performance, claiming the top spot at the 1 TB level . Most importantly, the ParAccel analytic database performance on vSphere was faster than the same setup in a physical environment.

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VMware Solutions New cloud, new business model • VMware vCloud® Director™ MicroStrategy’s cloud environments altered its business model, impacting both its own processes and how it delivered solutions to customers. Just four weeks after MicroStrategy • VMware vSphere® vMotion® implemented its internal private cloud, the benefits were apparent:

• VMware ESX® • Productivity and efficiency gains • VMware vShield App™ • More responsive support • VMware vShield Edge™ • Expanding the environment to accelerate sales • Millions in cost savings • VMware vSphere® • VMware® vCenter Server™ Real-time infrastructure for development productivity and efficiency Until recently, MicroStrategy software engineers would enter the office and spend their first hour setting up a machine with the latest version of MicroStrategy’s code. With VMware APIs Applications Virtualized and vCloud Director, this step has been completely automated. Engineers can deploy a machine • Mission Critical template from the private cloud and install yesterday’s source code in real-time, with no more --Sybase, DB2 UDB, SQL than four clicks. The immediacy translates to incredible productivity gains when multiplying Server, Oracle, Informix the hours in savings by the number of engineers at MicroStrategy. • Business Critical Databases VMware and NetApp integration has led to more capacity for MicroStrategy’s private cloud. --MySQL, PostgreSQL Users never need to be alerted when a crash happens, or when MicroStrategy needs to patch a repair, because the system keeps running on a different virtual machine. Downtime is virtually • Analytic Databases eliminated. MicroStrategy also gains storage efficiencies through virtualization. The private --, ParAccel, cloud’s elasticity guarantees hardware is used as efficiently as possible while maintaining a , high performance profile. With this integration, MicroStrategy has seen a 60% improvement • Operating Systems in use of storage facilities.

--Linux, SUSE Linux, Red Hat More responsive support Linux Technical Support groups in Korea, China, Japan and London are now able to implement an • Business Intelligence efficient 24/7 support model, better serve customers and operate more efficiently thanks to Applications MicroStrategy’s internal private cloud. Worldwide tech support requires performance and --MicroStrategy-based productivity to quickly reproduce customer configurations and create full production reporting systems environments. MicroStrategy is now able to support its entire customer base with virtualized resources, and Technical Support representatives can better respond to --MicroStrategy Mobile customer support requests. demonstration environments (from Apple Appstore) Expanding the environment to accelerate sales • Web Applications The private cloud’s high degree of success led to an expansion of VMware within MicroStrategy’s --Microsoft IIS, Apache business. Before private cloud implementation, MicroStrategy demonstrated software in Tomcat offices around the world using a proprietary public cloud service provider. This offering cost MicroStrategy $80,000 each month in hosting fees. • Windows Productivity and Development Applications The private cloud was so robust that MicroStrategy was able to move 100% of its demo --MS Office, MS Visual Studio environment from a proprietary public cloud service to its VMware-based private cloud. MicroStrategy even coined the term, “Fast and Furious” for the private cloud, based on its agility and performance. Today, vCloud Director powers every customer demonstration or Platform Proof-Of-Concept environment, which can be provisioned end-to-end in less than 60 minutes. • Cisco Nexus 10Gbps back end This new environment gives MicroStrategy the ability to more easily prove value and take leveraging Nexus 1000v advantage of new business opportunities. • NetApp NAS presenting datastores over 10Gbps NFS Millions in cost savings • Cisco UCS with 24 B230 In virtualizing its internal operations, MicroStrategy cut the number of data center racks from 44 to 17 and eliminated over 200 physical servers. In just 21 square feet, MicroStrategy now Blades 512GB RAM supports hundreds of users and over 2000 concurrently running machines. That change alone has lowered the costs of storing, powering and maintaining physical servers for MicroStrategy.

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Beyond these reductions, MicroStrategy cut internal operating costs by $1,000,000 each year, just by transitioning off of a public cloud service provider.

MicroStrategy’s high degree of success and experience running a private cloud has been critical in building its commercial cloud infrastructure. The move to VMware has even generated new revenue for MicroStrategy.

Kevin Spurway, Vice President of Cloud Services and Strategic Marketing, said, “We’ve been able to use the cloud service to get into accounts that previously were difficult for us to get access to.”

An offering that’s better for our customers With its public cloud environment, MicroStrategy now supplies customers with the analytics they want and the ongoing service they can depend on, in the form of:

•New, competitive offering •Faster, better analytics •The ability to pioneer emerging markets

A new, competitive offering With VMware, MicroStrategy offers analytics in the cloud as a platform-as-a-service. Customers come to MicroStrategy for all the components needed for cloud-based analytics, in a pre- integrated format. Customers no longer need to worry about provisioning their own technology, or waiting for lengthy implementation processes that could take months to finish. MicroStrategy can now turn on an environment in as little as 48 hours. Further, customers avoid the large upfront investment. MicroStrategy has seen an outpouring of positive feedback because of this.

“Customers send us notes on how pleased they are that our turnkey is 48 hours,” Freixas explained. Because of how easy it is to get MicroStrategy up and running, customers can go live very quickly, a feat they couldn’t have done internally before the public cloud.

This makes MicroStrategy an efficient, one-stop shop for its customers.

Faster, better analytics The public cloud environment also gives MicroStrategy more flexibility and elasticity in serving customers. MicroStrategy can now adjust to meet its customers’ needs, especially in times of high demand. Take a MicroStrategy retail customer, for example. Many retailers run Monday mornings analytics to check performance over the weekend. With a high amount of users at one time, MicroStrategy needs the bandwidth to process requests quickly. The public cloud automatically expands as users sign in and scales down once users close out. With this capability, MicroStrategy can handle a rapid influx of users, and customers gain the insights they need without latency.

The environment MicroStrategy builds for its customers would be unmanageable, and the cost would be too high, without virtualization. Every environment is completely different from customer to customer, and the flexibility of the public cloud allows MicroStrategy to accommodate any setup.

“The business itself would not be possible for us to deliver in a cost-effective way if we didn’t have the virtualized infrastructure,” Freixas explained.

Help customers pioneer their industry Mobile is a growing market for business intelligence. With a cloud environment, MicroStrategy has become a leader in this area by delivering mobile analytics—faster and more easily than competitors. MicroStrategy’s Mobile demo environments are powered entirely by the cloud. By improving the way it operates, MicroStrategy can help customers become leaders in their industries through key, emerging insight. The intelligence also allows customers to enter the market without too much on the line.

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The future of business intelligence In the future, MicroStrategy hopes to expand its virtualization footprint and pioneer upcoming releases of VMware’s product suite. A large percentage of MicroStrategy customers are running software on top of VMware currently, so finding new ways to work together ultimately translates into increasing customer satisfaction. This partnership will also lead to the ability for customers to deploy more business intelligence applications with MicroStrategy.

Efficiency and performance for all MicroStrategy has seen immediate benefits that extend beyond its internal IT to its customers. The public and private cloud functionality delivered by VMware enables MicroStrategy to transfer its IT innovation into success for its customers.

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com Copyright © 2012 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents. VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. Item No: VMW-CS-MICRO-STRATEGY-USLET-105 08/12