Microsoft System CenterCustomer Solution Case Study

As Cloud Gold Rush era begins,Competes with strengthened IT infrastructure and operation capabilities

OverviewCountry or Region: KoreaIndustry: IT serviceCustomer ProfileLG CNS is an IT service company with about 9,000 employees in Korea and overseas affiliates including China ㆍJapan ㆍ U.S. ㆍ India ㆍ Europe ㆍ Brazilㆍ Middle East and Indonesia as of 2010. .

Business SituationAround 2010, cloud gold rush began blowing in the IT and communications industries. Under these circumstances, LG CNS needed to achieve competitive edge of its own.

SolutionIt established a dedicated organization for commercialization of both private and public cloud and created an environment that managers can reliably operate infrastructure suitable for automated tools and process.

Benefits Guarantees 99.99% availability Increases resources utilization rate

from 10% to 200% Increases work efficiency Smooth expansion to hybrid cloud

“From CPU standard, existing single equipment utilization rate showed an average of about 10%. However, in the cloud environment this utilization rate increased to about 150% and when there is sufficient memory this utilization rate can increase to about 200%”Since the late 2000s, LG CNS has made a commitment to build new data center, configure cloud stack, reorganize its organization and promote research development. As LG CNS had thoroughly prepared in advance, it could increase its leadership by providing private cloud service to existing customers in 2010 and launching public cloud service including Korea’s first virtual data center in 2011. LG CNS newly established an organization made up of talented people with a comprehensive understanding about network, server and applications and they would utilize automation tools including System Center to increase work efficiency to reduce burden. This kind of direction is showing benefits in the actual management field. LG CNS’ cloud service organization is experiencing remarkably increasing resource utilization rate and work productivity of manpower compared to the past.

SituationLG CNS aggressively began cloud service in 2010 when it was equipped Blade based high density server infrastructure to start private cloud service for existing customers. In 2011, LG CNS revealed vDataCenter, vHosting, vDesktop, vApps portfolio for public cloud service. It began providing cloud related total service including IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS(Platform as a Service) and SaaS(Software as a Service).

This movement of LG CNS is one step ahead of its competitors in the industry. LG CNS was able to achieve this because it had made sufficient preparations and investments. Around 2010, a large number of IT service providers and telcos have rushed into competition for cloud gold rush. For IT service providers, it was an important strategic goal to acquire leading position in the emerging market. LG CNS also realized the important of leadership in this market and has made its own preparations for a long time.

LG CNS considered cloud as one of the future core businesses and has endeavored the past few years enhancing its infrastructure, organization, know-how and technology. LG CNS perceived early on that cloud is not a business that one department can make preparations and promote. In fact, cloud is a business that cannot start without making preparations for the state-of-the-art data center. In order to satisfy timely values of environmental friendly and high efficiency, it is necessary to utilize Blade servers but the data center built in the 80s~90s do not meet the hardware advancement direction

in terms of power supply and weight per footprint.

Fortunately, LG CNS, which paid close attention to cloud early on, has a solid data center basis. In 2007, it opened its Sangam Data Center, an environmental friendly ㆍstate-of-the-art data center on 1,430 pyung of land, 13,300 pyung of total building floor space. At that time, the Sangam IT center was not only the largest data center in Korea but also a topic of conversation for reflecting state-of-the-art technologies in all areas including architecture, security, power supply and air conditioning facilities. A distinguishing feature of the Sangam IT Center is that in addition to its facilities, it integrated IT R&D and education functions within a single facility.

In addition to its infrastructure preparations, LG CNS also paid close attention to organization and technology. LG CNS launched cloud service organization in 2010. A manager for LG CNS said, “There are many people and organizations linked with cloud and it is important to define roles and responsibilities(R&R). LG CNS newly established cloud service team that has no traditional work boundaries including network, server and applications in 2010.” While it was rearranging its organization, LG CNS showed unique agility in making technological preparations including signing MOU with Microsoft for cooperation in the next-generation Information Technology in the same year.

SolutionLG CNS also considered fusing its know-how not only in facilities, organizations and technology but also operation as important

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points for preparing for entry into the cloud market. It reckoned that though there is good facility and software, the quality of service felt by customers depends of operation know-how. He said, “Customers do not care which hypervisor technology is used on which server.” They just want to keep accessing services without any problems.”

LG CNS, which established cloud operation strategy from the perspective of customers, configured a vendor neutral as well as highly stable, reliable, scalable cloud stack. Then it aggressively started to deploy infrastructure. It built each service based clusters for configuring infrastructure,.

Each cluster is separated by physical chassis unit, has host and management node and links with external physical L4/L7 switch and trunk method. In addition, the Windows Server and Linux server are configured with different hypervisor respectively to increase costs versus operation efficiency.

In such environment, LG CNS began searching for answers as to how to increase user convenience and work efficiency of administrators. It found hints in self-service portal. When connected to self-service portal, hypervisor management solution provides what one desires.

LG CNS deployed System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2007(hereinafter referred to as SCVM 2007) and management tools for Linux to enable customers to access ‘MyCloud’ site, configure their desired capacity and performance, and easily request for virtual machine.

Ji-Soo, Han, assistant manager, LG CNS, said, “When customer request for Windows Server in ‘MyCloud’, a call will be made to SCVM 2007 and a virtual machine will be generated. SCVM 2007 is used for processing request for virtual machine generation and management automation.”

On the other hand, management of all virtual machines is made centrally through the system monitoring and management tools used by LG CNS. LG CNS defined the procedures to automatically install and distribute its management tool agent when virtual machines are generated.

Benefits

Guarantees 99.99% availabilityLG CNS’s cloud service offers 99.99% availability. This is a promise, that is Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the customer. LG CNS believes that the previous physical single server could not be compared to cloud server. Usually it is difficult to duplicate all resources if the single server is not mission-critical. However, there is no need to split hairs about the kinds of tasks (businesses) in the cloud environment since the infrastructure, itself is redundant.

Han said, “All physical areas including network and security are redundant. Even the Blade server has separated chassis depending on host and share I/O by chassis unit to focus on performance and reliability.”

She added, “Most hardware equipment support hot swap to enable changes of parts without turning off the power so there is no need for downtime except for firmware upgrade. Since Virtual machine

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migration is also conducted in non-stop mode, it can ensure high availability of overall infrastructure.”

Increases resources utilization rate from 10% to 200% Cloud environment offers service providers and users costs benefits, particularly in the area of capital outlays. Generally server resources do not show high utilization rate even at peak time. However, cloud environment, which utilizes share resources, maximizes resources utilization rate.

Han said, “From a CPU standard, existing single equipment showed about 10% utilization rate on average. In the cloud environment, the average utilization rate is about 150% and when there is sufficient memory then the utilization rate can increase up to 200%.”

Increase work efficiency of IT administrator by 1.5 foldThe individual work productivity of LG CNS’s cloud dedicated organization is considered a leading level internally. Han said, “Compared to the past of managing server by physical unit, the virtual machine basis has increase about 1.5 fold in terms of operated unit. In addition to number of units, the administrator had to manage various systems including network and server.”

Although the number of systems that the administrator had to handle has increased but their daily work is not much different from the past because most tasks are automated and manual handling of physical systems have disappeared.

Han said, “While managing the cloud environment, the instances where I had to go personally to the machine room has decreased significantly. When Blade server infrastructure was first configured, most physical tasks were completed so there is no need to go down to the machine room to perform tasks such as network wiring for future expansion.”

Smooth expansion to hybrid cloud

LG CNS is also considering turning its cloud infrastructure and operation management system into hybrid cloud. It is considering flexibility and connectivity to use resources of public cloud providers including Microsoft Windows Azure or Amazon EC2 when there is sudden need to expand resources.

A manager for LG CNS said, “There is no need for cloud providers to have huge resources that are idle. Now customers demand that cloud providers should have interconnectable stacks that can link between private and public cloud and its own management policy.”

LG CNS expects to significantly increase utilization value of System Center under these changes. LG CNS has recognized the potential of System Center 2012, which has evolved to enable seamless operation, management and monitoring hybrid cloud, and now also reviews internally which tools it would utilize in the future.

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Microsoft System CenterSystem Center solutions help IT pros manage the physical and virtual information technology (IT) environments across data centers, client computers, and devices. Using these integrated and automated management solutions, IT organizations can be more productive service providers to their businesses.

For more information on Microsoft System Center please visit:  www.microsoft.com/systemcenter

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about LG CNS’s products and services, call 82-1661-3888 or visit the website at: cloud.lgcns.com/

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter− System Center Virtual Machine

Manger 2007

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