Customer Solution Case Study
/ Fuel Transporter Simplifies IT, Cuts Costs with Virtualization and Unified Management
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Manufacturing—Oil and gas
Customer Profile
Tulsa, Oklahoma–based Explorer Pipeline operates a 1,900-mile pipeline that transports gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel between the Gulf Coast and the Midwest.
Business Situation
With a lean IT infrastructure group of four people, Explorer Pipeline is always looking for new ways to increase IT efficiency and improve its ability to proactively resolve potential issues.
Solution
The company consolidated and virtualized several of its servers and implemented Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 to manage both its client and physical and virtual server infrastructures.
Benefits
- Reduced power costs
- Greater control of IT environment
- Increased IT efficiency with a simplified environment
Tim Vander Kooi, Systems Administrator, Explorer Pipeline
The four-person IT infrastructure group at Explorer Pipeline sought new ways to simplify IT management and improve efficiency for the company’s distributed IT environment. First, the company cut costs by consolidating several server workloads using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V virtualization technology. Next, Explorer Pipeline upgraded to Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010, which simplifies the complexity of managing both physical and virtual servers with a single integrated solution. Finally, to help critical business data, the company upgraded to Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 for centralized backup and recovery of virtual and physical servers as well as client computers. As a result, the midsize company reduced power consumption, improved its ability to proactively manage its IT environment, and increased IT efficiency.
Situation
Fuel transportation company Explorer Pipeline operates a 1,900-mile pipeline system that distributes gasoline and other fuels to more than 70 major population centers in 16 states. The company has 185 employees spread among its Tulsa, Oklahoma, headquarters and seven remote offices across the United States.
The midsize company has a four-person IT infrastructure group that tackles the same challenges larger corporations face, such as desktop support and infrastructure management, but with fewer resources and a strong imperative to keep IT costs at bay. The IT department at Explorer Pipeline manages 235 desktop and portable computers that run a mix of the Windows XP Service Pack 3 and the Windows 7 operating systems. It also manages 32 physical servers—25 at its Tulsa headquarters and one at each of its seven branch offices—that run a mix of the Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems.
Prior to 2007, the IT department used a variety of disparate management tools to keep the client and server environments running. While the tools were functional, they were not integrated with each other and lacked built-in intelligence, resulting in IT inefficiencies. To help improve efficiency and simplify IT management, Explorer Pipeline deployed Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 in March 2007, which allowed the company to bring its management tools into a single console. As a result of using System Center Essentials 2007 to manage its client and server infrastructure, Explorer Pipeline streamlined IT management, increased employee productivity across the company, and improved the health of its corporate network. In fact, the IT department reduced the time spent manually deploying updates by 75 percent, saving U.S.$3,000 in travel expenses alone to visit each site to update client computers.
Even with the significant benefits that Explorer Pipeline realized with System Center Essentials 2007, the company continued to seek new ways to further simplify IT management and reduce costs, especially in a turbulent economic climate.
In particular, the company wanted to virtualize its server environment in an effort to simplify the complexity of its IT environment. However, when the company calculated the return on investment of server virtualization, it found that, despite the potential energy savings, the cost of licensing and managing a virtual server environment was cost prohibitive. “VMware was incredibly expensive, and it was actually cheaper for us to run physical servers,” explains Tim Vander Kooi, Systems Administrator at Explorer Pipeline. Though it decided to stay with physical servers at the time, Explorer Pipeline did not rule out the potential for server virtualization, particularly if it could find a solution that was cost-effective and simple to manage.
Solution
In July 2008, Explorer Pipeline found the answer to its challenges with cost-effective virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and the Hyper-V virtualization technology. “When Hyper-V came out, that changed the whole game for us,” says Vander Kooi. The company initially tested Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V with two virtual servers and increased its virtualization efforts with Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. “We really went full steam ahead with Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and started virtualizing several business-critical production servers,” continues Vander Kooi.
Now, after consolidating several server roles, Explorer Pipeline has 25 physical servers and 8 virtual servers—down from 42 servers. The IT department used tools built into Hyper-V to manage its virtual server environment, and while the company was reaping the benefits of virtualization, such as reduced power consumption and cooling costs, it found itself back in the position of managing its IT infrastructure with more than one solution.
“The power savings we’re seeing with Hyper-V is staggering. In some cases, it’s up to 600 percent savings for a server. ...”Tim Vander Kooi, Systems Administrator, Explorer Pipeline
To address its need for a unified management solution, Explorer Pipeline upgraded to Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010, which includes built-in Virtual Machine Manager technology. In July 2009, after enrolling in the Technology Adopter Program at Microsoft, Explorer Pipeline implemented the beta release of System Center Essentials 2010 on 32-bit hardware. With the release candidate version, the company upgraded to 64-bit hardware in order to take advantage of the built-in capabilities to manage virtual machines.
Explorer Pipeline uses System Center Essentials 2010 to monitor and manage its 235 client computers and both its physical and virtual server infrastructure. As with System Center Essentials 2007, IT support personnel can see the health of the company’s client and server infrastructure with a single glance in a unified console, and personnel have found that System Center Essentials 2010 has an even more intuitive user interface that is simpler to use. In addition, Explorer Pipeline enjoys using the auto-discover feature in System Center Essentials 2010, through which IT personnel can automatically discover and add new computers on the network to be managed.
As soon as they are released, critical and important software updates are deployed on all client and server computers on the corporate network. In addition, Vander Kooi added definition updates for Microsoft Forefront Client Security, which the company uses for its antivirus and malicious software detection solution on its computers. As a result, when Microsoft sends definition updates for Forefront Client Security, they are automatically authorized and deployed to the network. Vander Kooi also created a Group Policyobject that overrides the automatic discovery for several servers that he prefers to manage manually. “One of the great things about System Center Essentials 2010 is that it gives me the granular control I need to manage our IT infrastructure the way that our business demands—it’s incredibly flexible,” explains Vander Kooi.
Explorer Pipeline is taking advantage of the virtual machine management capabilities in System Center Essentials 2010. Specifically, IT personnel benefit from templates that provide easy-to-use capabilities for building new virtual machines. System Center Essentials 2010 also affords administrators flexibility to build virtual machines from scratch. “I’ve built virtual machines both from the templates and also from the media,” explains Vander Kooi. “Both ways worked great and the virtual machine management capabilities in System Center Essentials 2010 really take the difficulty out of building machines.”
Previously, IT personnel took snapshots of virtual machines as part of its backup process. Now, Explorer Pipeline uses Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2010, which offers backup and recovery support for Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, to back up its virtual and physical servers, as well as its client computers. “Backing up virtual machines with Data Protection Manager 2010 is incredibly easy and powerful,” says Vander Kooi. “I pretty much set it and forget about it.”
The company is planning to implement Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, both of which it will also back up and recover with System Center Data Protection Manager.
Benefits
Although it is a midsize company, Explorer Pipeline faces enterprise-level challenges as it strives for optimized IT efficiency and streamlined management of its infrastructure at lower costs. The company found a comprehensive solution to these challenges with System Center Essentials 2010, Hyper-V, and System Center Data Protection Manager 2010. Explorer Pipeline is benefitting from reduced power consumption in its server environment, an improved ability to control and proactively manage its IT infrastructure, and increased IT efficiency through simplifying IT management.
Reduced Power Consumption
Explorer Pipeline had previously seen a 50 percent reduction in power consumption when it upgraded its physical servers to Windows Server 2008. The company further reduced its power consumption when it virtualized eight servers with Hyper-V. “The power savings we’re seeing with Hyper-V is staggering,” says Vander Kooi. “In some cases, it’s up to 600 percent savings for a server, and that doesn’t even take into consideration what we’re saving on cooling costs for running fewer physical servers.”
Improved Ability to Control and Proactively Manage IT
With System Center Essentials 2010, IT personnel at Explorer Pipeline can manage the client and server environments—both physical and virtual servers—from a single, unified console. “What really sticks out is that System Center Essentials 2010 enables us to be more proactive and solve issues before they become problems that are going to negatively impact our productivity or, worse, our network,” explains Vander Kooi. For example, from the System Center Essentials console, IT support personnel can see at a glance the capacity limits for the hard disk drives on each desktop and portable computer on the network. If any hard disk drive is near capacity, IT personnel can proactively upgrade it before it reaches maximum capacity and impedes employee productivity.
Increased IT Efficiency
As a result of implementing Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and taking advantage of virtualization technologies, Explorer Pipeline gained efficiencies by consolidating its server infrastructure from 42 physical servers to 25 physical servers and 8 virtual servers. “We were able to take all of our disparate servers, analyze usage, and then consolidate servers in a logical way that helps us to correctly proportion server resources,” explains Vander Kooi. “Now, we can dynamically change our server environment as business demands and build virtual machines that meet our needs.”
In addition, thanks to the detailed level of control in System Center Essentials 2010, IT personnel are able to automatically discover new computers instead of relying on manual processes to bring computers under management and deploy antivirus software. As a result, the IT department saves 30 minutes each week in manual labor. “Though it may only be 26 hours a year, for us that is a lot of time to devote to more strategic tasks,” says Vander Kooi. “Plus, in addition to the actual time saved, it also is a load off of my mind. It’s a task I can take off my calendar and don’t have to worry about—even when I’m on vacation—because I know it’s being taken care of by System Center Essentials.”
Microsoft System Center
System 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: