Performance Tools from HP Help IT Services Provider Savvis Scale to Meet Customer Needs

Performance Tools from HP Help IT Services Provider Savvis
Scale to Meet Customer Needs
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2012 on how an IT-as-a-service
provider has met the challenge of delivering better experiences for users.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: HP

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Performance
podcast series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your co-host and moderator for this ongoing discussing of IT innovation and
how it's making an impact on people’s life.

Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are improving performance of
their services to deliver better experiences and payoffs for businesses and end
users alike. This time, we’re coming to you directly from the HP Discover
2012 Conference in Las Vegas. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We’re here the week of June 4 to explore some award-winning case studies from leading
enterprises. We’ll see how a series of innovative solutions and an IT
transformation approach -- to better support business goals and performance --
is benefiting these companies, their internal users, and their global customers.

Our next innovation case study interview highlights how cloud infrastructure
and hosted IT services provider Savvis has been able to automate out
complexity and add deep efficiency to its operations. Using a range of
performance, operations orchestration and Business Service Automation (BSA)
solutions from HP, Savvis has improved its incident resolution and sped the delivery of new
cloud services to its enterprise clients.

To learn more about how they did it, we're joined by Art Sanderson, Senior Manager Enterprise
Management Tools at Savvis. Welcome, Art.

Art Sanderson: Hi, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: Tell me first a little bit about Savvis. What kind of organization is is, what you’re
doing, what is your main service drivers in the marketplace?

Sanderson: Savvis is recognized as a global IT leader in providing IT as a service (ITaaS) to
many of today’s most recognizable enterprise customers around the world. We offer cloud
services and hosting infrastructure services to those customers.

Gardner: What are some of the challenges you've faced in terms of managing the scale, building
out the business, adapting to some of these new requirements for infrastructure as a service
(IaaS)?

Sanderson: Being an IT department of IT departments, or a dynamic service provider, has a lot
of unique challenges that you don’t face in every IT shop that you run into. In fact, we have
thousands of customers that we have to support with their own IT departments. So our solutions
have to be able to scale beyond what you would find in a typical IT organization.

Gardner: And I should think that efficiency is super-important. It's all margin to you, when you
can save and do things efficiently?

Better SLAs

Sanderson: Absolutely. There are just the efficiencies alone for operational cost, as well as the
value that we provide to our customers, being able to provide better service-level agreements
(SLAs), so their businesses are up and running and available to them to service their own
customers.

Gardner: So, in effect, you have to be better at IT than your customers, or they wouldn’t be
interested in using you.

Sanderson: Absolutely. There are definitely some economies of scale there.

Gardner: So tell me a bit about what you've done in terms of management and allowing for
better automation, orchestration, and then, how those benefits get passed on.

Sanderson: Sure. We've adopted the HP BSA set of tools as our automation platform and we’ve
used that in a number of different ways and areas within Savvis. It's been quite a
journey. We’ve been using the tools for approximately three to four years now
within Savvis. We started out with some of our operational uses, and they've
matured to the point now where a lot of our automation-type monitorings are
solved by automations rather than by our operational staff.

There is definitely labor saving there, as well as time savings in mean time to
resolution values that we’re adding to our customers. That's just one of the
benefits that we’re seeing from the automation tools, not to mention the fact that
we build a lot of our own key product offerings for the marketplace that we service, using the
BSA offerings on the back end as well.

Gardner: What's an example of some of those services that you've built out?

Sanderson: Our premier services are our Symphony cloud offerings, our Symphony VPDC,
Symphony Open and Dedicated cloud, as well as Symphony Database. All, in some form or

fashion in various degrees, use the BSA tools on the back end to do their own offerings, and their
own automations that we offer our customers.

Gardner: How do you measure performance benefits? You had a couple of numbers there about
efficiency, but is there a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) or some benchmarks? How do
you decide that you’re doing it well enough?

Sanderson: From an operational perspective, we do monitor the number of automations that we
run that we can capture from the operational side of the house. For example, on a typical day we
run anywhere from 10,000-20,000 types of automations through our systems, and that would
actually add value back to the business from a labor-savings perspective.

In just this first quarter of 2012 alone, we recognized somewhere in the neighborhood of
$250,000 in labor savings just from the automations from an operational perspective. Again, it's
hard to quantify the value of adding to the business side, because those are solutions that we’re
offering to the market space that are generating new value back to the organization as a whole.

Gardner: So it's important not only to reduce your cost, improve your productivity but you have
to create new revenue as well. So, it's sort of a multiple trick here. You’re cutting cost and you’re
also creating new products and services.

Tell me a bit about the process behind that? How are the people adapting to some of these
systems? How do you manage the people and process side of this in order to get those
innovations out?

Mature process

Sanderson: From the people and process side, we didn’t start out necessarily doing it the right
way from the operations side of the house. But we have matured the process to where we're now
delivering solutions in a much more rapid fashion. The business is driving the priorities from an
operational perspective as far as what we’re spending our time on.

Then, we can typically turn around automations in a very short time. In some cases, we’ve built
frameworks using these tools where we can turn around an automation that used to take two to
three weeks. Now, it can take less than an hour to turn around that same automation.

So we’ve gotten really smart at what we’re doing with the tools, not just building something net
new every time, but also making the tools more reusable themselves.

From the value to the organization, we’ve also had many groups within the product engineering
side of the house take on and learn tools like HP Operations Orchestration (HPOO) and HP
Service Activator (HPSA), and leverage their own domain knowledge as network engineers or
storage engineers to build net new solutions that we then turn around and offer to our customers.

That eliminates a lot of the business analyst type of work and things like that that would typically
go into the normal systems development lifecycle (SDLC)-type process that you would see.
We’re able to cut the time to market for the offerings that we’re producing for our customers.

Gardner: And of course, that has a direct bearing on how you can compete in the marketplace, a
very dynamic and fast moving marketplace?

Sanderson: Yes, absolutely. It does make us much more agile and responsive to the needs of our
customers and the industry.

Gardner: Let's go back to the scale of what you’re doing here just for our audience’s benefit.
How large is Savvis? How many physical and virtual servers do you have? Are there any wow
numbers you can provide for us about the extent and the size of your operations?

Sanderson: Today, we have about 25,000 servers under management, spread across 50 data
centers worldwide, and just to give you an idea, we have approximately 9,000-10,000
automations on a typical day running through HPOO.

As far as the scale and break down of the servers, two-thirds of our servers today are virtualized,
and either through the cloud or actual traditional orders that customers are placing. So, we’re
seeing a lot of growth in the virtual machines (VMs) and the cloud space. This is where things
are going for our organization as well as the industry.

Gardner: That's really impressive. I understand you've got a self-service portal and you've been
talking about things called self-healing. Maybe you could explain why it's important to have self-
service, but then also explain how behind-the-scenes you have self-healing?

Self healing

Sanderson: Our self-healing infrastructure is what I was referring to earlier, where we’ve
actually matured our process and recognized the reusability of using a meta-model to drive our
HPOO flows that we’re writing. We've taken those patterns that we’ve identified and have been
able to build a meta-model that we now have built a user interface in front of.

That's what I was referring to earlier when I said that if somebody wants a new request, they can
go in and request that from us, and then we can, within a matter of minutes, produce the data
through the user interface and publish a new flow, without ever having to write new operations
orchestrations flows.

Gardner: Tell me a little bit about what your future plans are? Do you have an upgrade path?
You’re here at Discover learning about new products and services. Do you have any idea of what
some of the next steps will be for continuing on this march to improve both innovation and
productivity?

Sanderson: Obviously, the reason we come to these conferences, is to learn about where HP is
going, so we can make sure that we're in alignment, both from our business needs, as well as
where the products are going that we use to drive our own solution.

It's critical that we're able to maintain an upgrade path and we're able to support our business.
We've already started to plan, based on what we see coming down the path from HP's future
infrastructure and even dedicated infrastructure as our business continues to grow. For example,
for the Symphony products that we were referring to earlier, we have to break off more-and-more
dedicated infrastructure to the scale and capacity that they’re growing.

We would have never have anticipated, when we started a few years ago, that a customer would
have come to us to say that we want to order 400 VMs or we want to order 1,000 VMs, but
customers are coming us today doing that. That's the kind of scale that we’re seeing, even just a
year into the offerings that we’re providing to the marketplace.

Gardner: So clearly, there's an opportunity for you to be able to dig in and provide that scale
when it's called for, and I guess that's almost a deﬁnition of cloud is having that elasticity and
dynamic agility.

Sanderson: Absolutely. That's spot on.

Gardner: Very good. We’ve been talking with Savvis, a cloud services provider, and I want to
thank our guest. We were talking with Art Sanderson. He is a Senior Manager of Enterprise
Management Tools at Savvis. Thank you very much.

Sanderson: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And I also want to thank our audience for joining this special HP Discover
Performance podcast coming from the HP Discover 2012 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of
HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: HP

Transcript of a BrieﬁngsDirect podcast from HP Discover 2012 on how an IT-as-a-service
provider has met the challenge of delivering better experiences for users. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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