Microsoft Server Product PortfolioCustomer Solution Case Study

California County Builds Private Cloud, Reduces IT Infrastructure Costs by 50 Percent

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Public sector—State and local

Customer ProfileSan Bernardino County is located in Southern California with a growing population currently at about 2 million. The county has 19,000 employees.

Business SituationThe county’s highly decentralized IT infrastructure, spread across 20,000 square miles, was difficult and expensive to maintain. The county wanted to switch to a centralized IT infrastructure as a service model.

SolutionSan Bernardino achieved its goal by establishing a private cloud for its IT infrastructure, based on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 with Hyper-V, and Microsoft System Center 2012.

Benefits Reduces infrastructure costs by 50

percent Gains high availability infrastructure Brings new servers online in an hour,

down from weeks Supports private cloud, IT services

strategy

“Our departments and agencies will only rely on us to deliver infrastructure services if we can do it better, faster, and cheaper than they can do it. With Microsoft technologies, we can.”

Jake Cordova, Division Chief, Information Services Department, San Bernardino County

San Bernardino County—the largest county in the United States—found it increasingly challenging to provide high-quality, low-cost, decentralized IT infrastructure to departments and offices spread across its 20,000 miles. That’s why it adopted a centralized IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS) strategy. To implement it, the county built a private cloud based on Microsoft technologies. The county gains far greater management capability than it had with virtualization alone, so it has reduced infrastructure costs by 50 percent, boosted availability, and gained greater agility—for example, being able to bring new virtual servers online in an hour compared to weeks for physical machines.

SituationAt 20,000 square miles, California’s San Bernardino County can best be described as “vast.” Other counties might have more money or more people, but none is bigger. The county is larger than nine US states, larger even than Switzerland, Denmark, and others.

The county’s vastness, spanning deserts, mountain ranges, cities and towns, poses challenges to any organization seeking to operate throughout San Bernardino—such as the county government itself. One of those challenges is dealing with the limits of technology. The county government employs 19,000 people in more than 35 county departments and agencies, and operates hundreds of facilities. Keeping technology systems running for all of those agencies, facilities, and employees gives new meaning to the term “wide area network.”

The highly dispersed technology infrastructure in San Bernardino County developed over two decades. Most county offices had their own computer servers, especially for line-of-business applications. Many also hosted their own infrastructure servers, such as domain controllers, directory services, and email servers, with others depending upon the county’s central Information Services Department (ISD).

This highly mixed environment served the county, but at a cost: it didn’t optimize the use of either technology or people. Computers acquired for new departments and agencies, for example, sometimes saw utilization rates of 15 percent.

“The way we did things, we had to buy hardware every time we wanted to do something new,” says Jake Cordova, Division Chief, Information Services Department (ISD), San Bernardino County. “It wasn’t the most effective way to go, to buy a server and spend [US]$12,000 or more just to run an application.”

The expense was only one of Cordova’s concerns. Another was the time that the process took. His department had to set specifications for a new computer, obtain bids, create a purchase order, wait for delivery, and then update and configure it to work within the county’s environment. If everything went according to plan, that process would take four to six weeks. If the computer hadn’t been accounted for in the year’s budget, then the money had to be found and the budget adjusted, adding weeks to the timeline.

“We wanted to be as agile as possible to deliver the best service to our internal customers,” says Cordova. “With the environment we had, that wasn’t possible.”

Delivering the best service, in fact, was a crucial part of the county’s larger technology plan: to centralize the delivery of IT IaaS. Far-flung departments and agencies would no longer need to support their own, decentralized IT infrastructures and applications. Instead, they could subscribe to the IT resources they needed on a monthly basis, increasing their subscriptions as their needs arose, and decreasing them as needs declined—much like paying a utility bill.

The departments and agencies would be relieved of responsibility for their

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“It wasn’t the most effective way to go, to buy a server and spend $12,000 or more just to run an application.”

Jake CordovaDivision Chief,

Information Services Department, San Bernardino County

infrastructures, so they could focus on their governmental missions. The centralized ISD, meanwhile, could make more productive, cost-effective use of its technology. It was potentially beneficial for everyone in the county—but it depended on the ISD delivering IT services to the departments better, faster, and cheaper than those departments could acquire and manage them on their own.

SolutionThe county had taken a step toward its IT infrastructure as a service model around 2004, with its first experimentation with virtualization technology. At the time, the most mature virtualization technology was VMware, which the county adopted for some of its line-of-business applications. The ability to host several virtual servers on a single physical host boosted efficiency.

Eight years later, when the county decided to virtualize its infrastructure, it had an alternative to VMware: Hyper-V virtualization technology. Included as a component of the Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 operating system, Hyper-V delivered the performance and reliability that the county needed, and it offered distinct advantages over VMware. It would support key infrastructure elements that the county already used, such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Active Directory Domain Services. It would give the county a single-vendor infrastructure system that would eliminate finger-pointing between vendors if problems arose. And, since the county already licensed Hyper-V as part of the Windows Server software that it already used, there would be relatively little additional cost.

“We virtualized our infrastructure on Hyper-V because it doesn’t make sense to buy what you already own,” Cordova points out.

Virtualizing the infrastructure led to server consolidation and cost savings, but it did little to deliver the agility that the county needed to deliver centralized IT IaaS. For that, the county needed to run its infrastructure services from a private cloud in which compute resources could be modified quickly and deployed wherever needed. The missing element was powerful system management.

That element wasn’t missing for long. San Bernardino County had been using Microsoft System Center management products for years to manage its physical environment. Now, it adopted the Microsoft System Center 2007 family for its virtual infrastructure, and is in the process of upgrading it to Microsoft System Center 2012.

With Microsoft System Center to manage the virtual environment, the county reorganized its physical infrastructure servers into two clusters, with two and three nodes. Each physical server hosts about 25 virtual machines, on average. The entire environment is supported by centralized storage area network (SAN) devices that largely replace department-level storage.

The county uses Microsoft System Center for broad health monitoring across the environment, including the monitoring and updating of the Windows Server software that supports both Hyper-V and VMware. The county also applies security policies

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“We virtualized our infrastructure on Hyper-V because it doesn’t make sense to buy what you already own.”

Jake CordovaDivision Chief,

Information Services Department, San Bernardino County

across the private cloud as a whole, rather than having to deploy those policies to each server at a time, as it did before.

The county makes particular use of the Virtual Machine Manager functionality in Microsoft System Center 2012. For example, it was a key tool in the reorganization of the isolated physical hosts into integrated clusters. Now, the county uses it to manage those clusters as a single, private cloud, moving resources and virtual machines from one physical host to another as needed. The county uses the live migration feature in Hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager to do this, and to do virtual machine maintenance without taking virtual machines out of service. It also uses Virtual Machine Manager functionality to deliver infrastructure services to county departments and agencies regardless of where those infrastructure resources are hosted at any given time. And it uses the technology’s template library to quickly create additional virtual machines for development and production needs.

BenefitsWith its adoption of Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center technologies, San Bernardino County has reduced infrastructure costs, increased both availability and agility, and furthered its IT IaaS strategy.

Reduces Infrastructure Costs by 50 PercentBy greatly reducing the amount of hardware and management time needed to support departments and agencies located across 20,000 square miles, San Bernardino

has achieved the cost efficiency that it sought.

“By using Microsoft private cloud technology, we can provide infrastructure at just 50 percent of the cost, on average, that departments were spending on their own,” says Cordova. “That’s a savings that is evident in the budgets of all the departments that get their infrastructure services through us—and, given the economy, we’re all looking for budget savings.”

A typical department might pay up to $25,000 on its own for two infrastructure servers. Instead, in addition to the savings it achieves by subscribing to the county’s centralized infrastructure services, the department gets to spread out its payments for those services over the course of the year. If its needs increase, it can acquire more IT services without having to buy another server. If its needs decrease, it can reduce its monthly subscription without idling capacity. The county has increased server utilization rates, for example, from about 15 percent to the 60 to 70 percent range that it considers ideal. The hardware savings continue year after year, as departments avoid the need to refresh their own physical servers.

The county also sees significant cost avoidance in management costs. The current environment is managed by one IT professional. Cordova estimates that, without virtualization, his department would have to hire one or two additional employees to manage enough physical servers to support the same workload. “We’re not in a position to hire additional personnel at this time,” he says. “We use

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“By using Microsoft private cloud technology, we can provide infrastructure at just 50 percent of the cost, on average, that departments were spending on their own.”

Jake CordovaDivision Chief,

Information Services Department, San Bernardino County

Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center to support an increase in infrastructure workload without increasing staff size—that’s a great productivity gain.”

Gains High Availability Infrastructure The county has something else that it didn’t have before: a highly available platform. “We couldn’t move forward with our plans for IT IaaS if our customers were seeing continual outages and we were continually diverted to deal with them,” says Michael Mouser, Division Manager, San Bernardino County.

The high availability of the Microsoft-based private cloud comes in part from the county’s use of Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center features, such as failover clustering and live migration, which combine to reduce the frequency of outages, to decrease the time that the county needs to repair outages, and to minimize the inconvenience to employees when a problem does arise. Brings New Servers Online in an Hour, Down from WeeksWith that foundation of high availability, the county can deliver new virtual machines to its internal customers far more quickly than was previously possible with physical servers. The county’s developers use this capability to consider more design variations and to test their applications more thoroughly than they could before—leading to higher-quality applications less likely to cause errors in production. Owners of production workloads can get additional infrastructure capacity in response to emergencies or sudden traffic spikes, again keeping production servers running.

The county’s ability to deliver additional capacity more quickly is striking. The private cloud eliminates the four-to-six week process of ordering and receiving physical servers. And it greatly reduces the time needed to update, configure, and otherwise prepare servers for production use—down from one-to-two days with physical servers to less than an hour with virtual machines.

County employees see greater agility in other ways, too. Applications that used to take several minutes to load onto an employee’s workstation now load within seconds. The result is technology that’s available when employees want it, rather than leaving employees waiting for the technology to catch up to them.

Supports Private Cloud, IT Services StrategyThe county’s use of private cloud technologies directly supports its strategic goal of delivering IT IaaS through a private cloud.

“Our goal is to use Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center to make our provision of infrastructure services to our internal customers as seamless and transparent as possible,” says Cordova. “Our departments and agencies will only rely on us to deliver infrastructure services if we can do it better, faster, and cheaper than they can do it. With Microsoft technologies, we can.”

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“Our goal is to use Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center to make our provision of infrastructure services to our internal customers as seamless and transparent as possible.”

Jake CordovaDivision Chief,

Information Services Department, San Bernardino County

Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers

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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 San Bernardino County, visit the website at: www.co.san-bernardino.ca.us

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

Document published September 2012

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010− Microsoft System Center 2012 Virtual

Machine Manager

Technologies− Active Directory Domain Services− Hyper-V