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When Hurricane Ike struck Texas in 2008, it became the second costliest hurricane ever to  make landfall   in the U.S. It was also a wake-up call for Houston-based  insurance wholesaler Myron Steves & Co., which was not struck directly but nonetheless realized its IT disaster recovery (DR) approach was woefully inadequate.

Supporting some 3,000 independent insurance   agencies in the Gulf Coast region,  with many insured properties in that active   hurricane zone, Myron  Steves must have all  it resources up and available, if and when severe  storms  strike.

The next BriefingsDirect discussion then centers on how Myron Steves, a small- to medium-sized business (SMB), developed and implemented a modern disaster recovery and business continuity strategy based on a high-degree of server and clients virtualization.

Learn how Tim Moudry, Associate Director of IT, and William Chambers, IT Operations Manager, both at 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 availability no mater what.

The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure:  VMware is a  sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Moudry: When Hurricane Ike came, we were using another DR support 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. 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.

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.

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: 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.

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

Then,  once you get into virtualization, 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: And so for you as an SMB with 200 employees,  what requirements were  involved? You  obviously don't have unlimited  resources and you don't  have a huge IT  staff.

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 it can't cost an arm and leg either. We're   an insurance broker.  We're not a carrier. We are between the 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.

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.

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.

Gardner: Why did you go 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.

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: Where are your data centers?

Moving to colos

Moudry: Right now it’s Houston and San Antonio, but we are moving all of our equipment to colos, and we are going to be in Phoenix and Houston.

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.

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

And  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?

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 notice that you're also a Microsoft shop. Did you look at their virtualization or DR? How come you didn’t go with Microsoft?

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.

Increased performance

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: 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 have 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'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.

It all 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.

Without disruption

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: How about some other metrics of success?

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: 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?

Chambers: If you are going to use virtualization, 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: 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.

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.

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Gardner: Clearly one of the  requirements  in game development is the need to   ramp up a lot of servers to do the builds, but then they sit there essentially unproductive    between the builds. How did you flatten that out or manage the    requirements around the workload support?

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: 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. What are some of the other 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. ... We’re probably   looking at  thousands of individual developers across the world.

... 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.

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: How did you start approaching that from your  IT  environment, to build the right infrastructure?

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.

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: 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.

Gaining cost benefits

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.

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.

Gardner: When you approach this hybrid cloud model, 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?

Hart: 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.

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.

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.

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 4.1  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.

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: Now that you've done this, 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?

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.

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