SUCCESS STORY
Large Energy Company Needs to Optimize Datacenter for Expansion
SITUATION STATEMENT
A large energy company had plans to increase its presence in Europe and Asia but had a barrier to entry because of datacenter costs(Capex). System utilization was less than 10%. Most of the utilization was towards the end of the month when energy reports were being generated and distributed to all customers which caused system issues affecting customers and impacting credibility.
70%
REDUCTION
Monthly Cost
ZERO MAINTENANCE
on DR and BCP
NO LICENSE
COST
for Virtualization Software
Client:
Large Energy company with offices in 100 countries and 33B in revenues
Infrastructure Overview:
Datacenter hosted in Sunnyvale, CA. Provides usage monitoring, management and analytics of energy data to customers worldwide.
SLA: 99%
Application:
3 tier application with Web, App and Database in the back end.
PROBLEM:
Increasing CAPEX and Support Costs
- Cost of running operations in Datacenter was increasing with new hardware purchases
- Legacy network architecture which was not flexible requiring specialized network engineers to maintain and troubleshoot
- Enterprise storage software for database with high support costs
- Expensive virtualization licensing
- Additional hardware and support cost for disaster recovery
- Inconsistent software environments created unstable production code leading to increased support costs
Business Driver:
- Plans to increase presence in Europe and Asia but had a big barrier to entry because of datacenter costs(Capex)
- System utilization was less than 10%
- Most of the utilization was towards the end of the month when energy reports were being generated and distributed to all customers which caused system issues affecting customers impacting credibility
SOLUTION:
Move to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Benefits Include:
- Capex vs Opex: Pay only for what you use
- Databases are automatically backed up saving proprietary vendor storage cost
- New network architecture with SDN which provides isolation and better security
- Independently scale any resource or service with on-demand elasticity and auto scaling
Architecture Plan & Implementation:
- Separation of 3 tier architecture into segments with security groups and dedicated network subnets provides isolation and management
- Separate VPC for Dev, Stage and Prod environment built using templates to eliminate variance
- Flexible compute sizing: Chose m3.medium and m3.large instances for web and app tier and c3 for database with a commitment of reserved instances to guarantee base performance and use on-demand instances for variable workloads thereby minimizing Opex costs
- Moved from hardware firewall & load balancers to *aaS with ELB and security groups
- AWS Glacier to store historical data for compliance purposes
