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Case Study

PLANVIEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY GROUP VIRTUALLY REINVENTS ITSELF AND THE BUSINESS
About Planview
With 20 years of innovation and over 500 customers worldwide across every industry, Planview is the independent leader in portfolio management. Planview provides integrated IT management for the IT market, product portfolio management for the product development market, and corporate portfolio management for the corporate performance market.
AT A GLANCE
CUSTOMER: Planview INDUSTRY: Financial services, Technology, Retail, Public Sector, Energy and Utilities, Insurance, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, and Others GEOGRAPHIES: Worldwide USES PLANVIEW ENTERPRISE TO: Understand the real costs of services and assign business value to each virtual machine. USES VIRTUALIZATION AND A SINGLE IT INFRASTRUCTURE TO: Create a highly flexible, production ready, and cost effective environment to grow their SaaS business

The Challenge
Jerry Sanchez became the rst Director of Information Technology at Planview in January 2008 and was immediately confronted with challenges in four areas: 1. STRATEGIC VISION Prior to January 2008, the IT group at Planview functioned as many IT groups doits focus was to maintain the functioning of computers, servers, and the network. The business did not know what it needed from IT except to respond quickly and improve abilities. What was needed was a strategic vision; it was unclear which part of the business would grow faster. Development environments? SaaS (Software as a Service) environments? Corporate initiatives? BUSINESS Planview had just hired several new developers and QA sta to improve time-to-market and quality; new test environments needed to be built quickly. Sharing environments and tools was problematic. In addition, it was taking 6-8 weeks to provision, or prepare and equip, for hosting customer environments. The hosting was being outsourced. Management wanted to bring it back in-house; Planview IT needed to ensure that its hosting operations were rock solid. INFRASTRUCTURE IT silos existed across departments and locations, There was massive and inecient server sprawl in the California, Austin, and German datacenters. CULTURE In addition to the lack of a strategic vision for IT, there was an immature tactical IT environment. There was a prevailing belief that Planview Enterprise could not be virtualized and an insistence that it had to be entirely on physical hardware. Because management saw IT only as a cost center, they were skeptical about large capital expenses and required very detailed ROI (Return on Investment) and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) justications for IT investments.

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We threw out everything we knew before and all the hardware and started from scratch. We spent 10% of the previously estimated cost and 4% the estimated time to do it. The payoff? The new infrastructure allowed us to turn on a new hosted environment for a customer within 24 hours and we grew the SaaS business 1000%.
Jerry Sanchez Director of Information Technology Planview

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In large part because of bringing hosting in-house and the mandate to grow the Planview SaaS business, it became clear that the demands on IT were going to be huge. The IT team had to move fast, build a rock-solid infrastructure, and do it on the cheap. At the same time, they had to maintain the existing environment and hire and train a new team to support the business.

Vision: One Infrastructure


In order to quickly build a highly reliable SaaS hosting capability, the IT team decided they needed one infrastructure to be the foundation of their strategic vision. The team crafted a set of three over-arching criteria: 1. HIGHLY FLEXIBLE Planview IT needed to be able to support multiple internal and external customers and meet their requirements for rapid deployment. They also needed the ability to scale locally and globally. Thus, a highly exible infrastructure was essential. PRODUCTION READY Each IT constituent had varying production needs. Product developments needs were dynamic. Sales needed to deliver on the promises of high performance and stability. The SaaS business and customers demand for a hosted Planview environment was accelerating. COST EFFECTIVE Determined to craft a solution with the lowest possible TCO, Sanchez and his team felt they could realize cost savings through consolidation and the use of readily available sta and skills.

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The Planview Solution


With criteria for success in hand, Jerry and his team spent two months researching how they were going to bring this vision into reality. Their goal was to build one easy-to-manage platform that would serve all their needs. They started from scratch and threw out everything they knew before. They questioned if there was any existing hardware purchased over the last ve years that was capable of doing what they needed and worth incorporating into the new infrastructure design. The answer? No. They needed to build a storage infrastructure from the ground up. Planview solutions are database-driven; for them to be successful, they needed to virtualize SQL and Oracle. Jerry wanted to understand why there was so much apprehension about virtualizing the Planview products and what was stopping them from doing so. To understand the current environment, they did a VMware capacity assessment for the existing physical servers and used stress test applications to discover disk input/output requirements. Planview management and internal experts strongly pushed back when approached about abandoning all existing hardware and most of their datacenters because they did not t into the new IT strategic vision. Condent the end results would justify such drastic measures, Sanchez and team pressed on. They talked to several vendors and realized that storage was going to be key. They needed to pick best-of-breed products and protocols and determine the physical datacenter location and ideal network topography. Datalink, an information storage architect that, according to their website, helps organizations analyze, design, implement, manage, and support customized data storage solutions, helped Planview. Together they aligned requirements and solutions and evaluated vendors in the areas of performance, storage eciency, redundancy, and backup and recovery. The t with Datalink was excellent. They had an alliance with NetApp (Network Appliance), which, according to their website, provides an integrated solution that enables storage, delivery, and management of network data and content to achieve your business goals. When NFS (Network File System) was suggested as the protocol to use, Sanchez nearly fell out of [his] chair. NFS was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1984 and, according to Wikipedia, allows a user on a client computer to access les over a network in a manner similar to how local storage is accessed. NFS, like many other protocols, builds on the Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call (ONC RPC) system. Sanchez considered this an old protocol that was not in the same class as iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) or Fibre Channel. He thought NFS was not enterprise-ready for customer-facing solutions and this was the most important criterion for him in choosing a storage networking protocol. After conducting research and still somewhat doubtful, Jerry relied on Datalinks expertise and decided that a NFS and NetApp infrastructure would be just what Planview needed. It became clear that they could implement Fibre Channel later if they experienced any issues. Having made a seemingly radical choice to use NFS, this gave Sanchez and team peace of mind. Why did they choose NFS and NetApp? This combination met the three criteria of the strategic vision. 1. HIGHLY FLEXIBLE Provisioning was easy with this solution.The ability to resize volumes on the y was key and they were able to simply refresh the datastore after changes. Thin-provisioning made disk requirement decisions trivial. PRODUCTION READY NFS is a highly stable protocol that has been used for 25 years and NetApp is the industry leader in providing NFS solutions. They architected a
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modular structure with maximum exibility and scalability. Included was NAS (Network-Attached Storage), which uses NFS le-based protocols to oer data storage on a computer that is accessed by heterogeneous clients attached to the network. It compares in performance to a SAN (Storage Area Network). Planview has a 99.98% SLA (Service Level Agreement) availability guarantee so a completely stable environment was a must; it was impossible for there to be any issue where the network would go down. NetApp Snapshot technology, according to their website, enables you to create point-in-time copies of le systems, which you can use to protect datafrom a single le to a complete disaster recovery solution. The ability to do snapshots at a le level allowed Planview IT to revert back to any environment from an hour ago, a week ago, a day ago, or whatever was needed; this was completely customizable and provided a new level of safety and recovery. 3. COST EFFECTIVE This was very inexpensive compared to other solutions due to a smaller physical footprint, Ethernet-only infrastructure, and low administrative overhead. The diagram below shows the physical layout of the solution.

Figure 1. The solution includes 10 TB of storage and 9 blades with 64 GB RAM and 2 processors each. The NetApp 3040 scales to 252 disk drives or 126 TB capacity.

After spending four months researching and analyzing possible solutions to determine the most exible, production ready, and cost eective one, it took the Planview IT team one month to install and implement this solution.

THE PAYOFF
Transforming IT and the infrastructure has paid o in four areas:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Improved corporate productivityGuaranteed that the development and quality assurance groups never have to wait on hardware, improved
sales with packaged hosting solutions, and changed IT into a true strategic business partner

Financial benetTurned a cost center into a prot center and provided detailed accounting of the cost for and usage of each virtual machine Industry competitive advantageMade the customer buying process easier with packaged hosting solutions and gained the ability to install Planview customer environments within 24 hours Easy IT managementProvided stable and rapid deployment of internal services and increased the job satisfaction of IT sta

Oering IT employees more fulllment at work is key to having a more productive and strategically aligned IT prot center. Much of the work that IT employees previously did was things like physically connecting switches and servers and installing operating systems. This is often mundane labor and can be a drain on morale. This new solutionbecause it uses the concept of virtualization and no new hardware needs to be installedenables the quick build of new environments.
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Planview IT has evolved from being a nancial drain in the eyes of management to being a true prot center. One of the key benets for Planview is the ability to rapidly grow the SaaS businessprimarily because IT has found a way to make hosting cost-ecient. It is easy to add new hosted customers because there is no need to go to management and request to purchase additional hardware. Instead, IT simply sets up a new environment for the customer as a virtual machine on existing hardware. Some of the biggest naysayers about virtualizing Planview Enterprise are now believers and are taking full advantage of the capabilities that virtualization aords. An example of this is when the VP of Development told Jerry that he needed 30 servers in two days time. Before installing a VMware virtual environment, that request would have taken a couple of months to fulll. With virtualization, Jerrys team was able to build the development environments in a day, hand it o, and move on to the next business initiative. Once Planview saw what IT could contribute to the business, the possibilities exploded. In looking at the roadmap for the upcoming year, the biggest challenge is managing rapid growth and virtual machine sprawl. Sanchezs team intially built the environment to support 75 virtual machines; they are currently running 400. When Sanchez approached the CFO to request new blades to handle the recent quarterly increase of 100 virtual machines, the CFO asked What are all these virtual machines doing? Jerrys response had previously been Well, theyre driving your business. He realized it was challenging to justy virtual machines. There was a disconnect between what the CFO expected and needed to hear to approve purchases and what IT provided. Jerrys team surveyed the products that Planview oers and saw that there was a big opportunity to use one of their own products to map the strategic business goals for each virtual machine. What Sanchez chose was Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management (SPM), an integrated component of Planview Enterprise that delivers unprecedented levels of transparency into services, assets, and applications. SPM enables improved decision making, reduces maintenance costs, and delivers new levels of transparency to the business. Planview SPM is the only solution that accurately links services with related assets, labor, and applications to reveal the true cost of delivering services to the business. This information enables one to determine the value of services, identify and eliminate ineciencies, accurately invoice business units, gain control of IT spending, and uncover hidden value in the IT department by reducing maintenance costs and delivering business services more eciently.

Figure 2. Planview Enterprise SPM dashboard views provide quick visual indicators of asset performance

Jerry uses Planview Enterprise SPM to place each virtual machine in a bucket that lines up with a project that may further map to a strategic goal. Today he can tell his CFO exactly which virtual machines are driving exactly which pieces of the businessengineering, corporate, and productionand thus explain why they are needed and useful. Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management is being rewritten to automatically grab virtual machine server information from a cluster. This eliminates the need to manually enter each new virtual machine.

Next Steps
Sanchez and team are constantly tweaking and evolving the solution so that it best ts the needs of the business. They are:

1. 2. 3. 4.

Proactively monitoring and managing the storage network bandwidth. Currently they are at 50% utilization and are monitoring when
to add controller interfaces.

Reviewing monthly NetApps NFS VMware Best Practices document to ensure there is nothing they need to change to keep in sync as
VMware releases new updates and NetApp releases new versions of the controller software

Moving to the more ecient VMware vSphere 4.0, which InfoWorld calls the next-generation management of virtual machines Building a separate datacenter, which would mirror the current environment and allow pool load balancing. This will occur
when VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) with NFS supportwhich allows disaster recovery failovercomes out of beta and is supported in Planview Enterprise.

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Bottom Line Benefits


What are the bottom line benets for the Planview IT group in being strategically aligned and contributing to the business?

I need 30 servers ready to go in two days from now for a new project my guys need to ramp up. Rob Reesor VP of Development Planview

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Ability to create and turn on a hosted Planview environment for a customer within 24 hours
Prior to virtualization, this was a lengthy process that included constructing a detailed plan of needed hardware, getting the plan approved, and purchasing and installing the hardware.

2.

Growth of 1000% in hosting revenue


Pre-congured hosting packages, the ability for Planview to bring the hosting in-house, and the capability to turn on the environment within 24 hours made hosting easy to purchase and sell and sky-rocketed revenue.

No problem. Well do you better than that and have them ready in a day. Jerry Sanchez Director of IT Planview

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Scalability
A virtual machine can be installed without adding new hardware. When extra physical capacity is needed, it is easy to add a new blade.

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Reduction in needed storage space


NetApp compresses the amount of data through deduplication and thus aords cost eciencies in storage space and the ability to store more data per unit.

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10% of cost of non-virtual solution and faster time-to-market


Despite throwing out all existing hardware and starting from scratch, the IT team installed the virtualization-architected solution for only 10% of the cost to purchase a more physical serverintense environment. They also installed and got the new solution up and running with no software rewrite in one month versus the two years previously estimated to rewrite the software for virtualization. The downside? Planview suered a lost opportunity cost in SaaS business for not taking the virtualization route sooner.

6.

Knowledge of true overall cost of services


Using Planview Enterprise Service Portfolio Management allowed the team to understand the real costs of services and assign business value to each virtual machine. This helped them allocate costs to each group in the business and justify to management the need for additional capacity.

For 20 years, Planview has been advancing the discipline of portfolio management, helping our customers change the way they manage people and money to make better business decisions. With a singular focus on portfolio management, Planview is the only company that combines customerdriven software, unmatched domain expertise, and proven best practices to solve each customers unique business problems. Planview Enterprise, a market-leading portfolio management application suite, with Planview PRISMS, the knowledge base for accelerating organizational change, and Planview Process Builder, for process modeling and management, delivers measurable business results for IT management, product development organizations and throughout the enterprise. As an independent, trusted partner, Planview is committed to interoperability with key management systems through the Planview OpenSuite integration product line. Industry leaders such as Citi, BP, and EDF, rely on Planview to drive revenue, mitigate risk, cut costs, create eciencies, and ultimately give their businesses a competitive advantage. Privately held and consistently protable, Planview is headquartered in Austin, Texas. With oces across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacic, the company supports customers in virtually every industry around the world. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

7.

More satisied IT sta, internal customers, and external customers


With faster, exible, quickly scalable, less physically-intensive deployment, and lower and easyto-document costs, all constituents experience more satisfaction with this solution.

2009 Planview, Inc. All rights reserved. Planview, Planview Enterprise, Planview OpenSuite, PRSISMS, Planview Process Builder, and the Planview logo mark are trademarks or registered trademarks of Planview, Inc. All other trademarks are acknowledged. Planview reserves the right to vary specifications and availability of these products and services without notice. bdb1109

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