Success Stories

Opinie na temat naszej firmy - Data Return

Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ Processors’ Virtualization Capabilities Help Data Return Better Serve Customers and Pursue New Markets

Profil
Data Return

"The Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processor combines pure, enterprise-class processing with scalable economics — an unusual feat in today’s market. By implementing a virtualization solution based on AMD64 technology, we have created a highly available and flexible environment with outstanding price/performance and performance-per-watt gains, which has allowed us to improve service and expand our customer base.” — said Jason Lochhead, Co-founder and Principal Architect, Data Return "

Challenge

Data Return is a managed services provider (MSP), and offers managed hosting and IT operations outsourcing services.
Date Return customers like H&R Block maintain some of the world’s busiest Web sites, although the traffic is often seasonal, leaving purchased infrastructure unused other times of the year.
Data Return sought ways to improve customer service via a highly available, high performing, affordable, and efficient IT environment that also enabled the company to quickly and easily roll out new services to its customers.
Additionally, Data Return needed a solution that would appeal to small and medium-sized businesses as well its traditional enterprise customers.

Solution

Data Return implemented a virtualization solution based on Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processors running VMware® virtual infrastructure software on HP ProLiant® DL385 and DL585 servers.
“Benchmarks proved the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor delivered the same, if not better, performance than competing technologies at a lower cost and with lower energy consumption,” said Jason Lochhead, Co-founder and Principal Architect, Data Return.
Data Return created Infinistructure™, its utility-enabled managed services platform, on AMD64 to help it target new markets such as mid-sized businesses.

Impact

The new solution delivered on the promise of lower costs, reduced energy consumption, flexibility, and high availability, resulting in improved service and new services such as disaster recovery for customers.
“When our customers need robust processing power they can run a database powered by a costly infrastructure or run the same applications with four Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors — at half the cost due to hardware price point and multi-core licensing advantages. This is one of the many reasons why the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor is our processor of choice,” said Lochhead.
The AMD64-based platform also provided the foundation for the company’s successful Infinistructure launch at the end of 2005, which has helped expand Data Return’s customer base.

Organizational Profile
Founded in 1996, Data Return provides strategic IT operations services to leading companies around the world. Its clients rely on Data Return’s experience, proven capabilities, and innovative digitalOps™ service delivery platform to manage their business-critical applications and infrastructure. Its experienced team of professionals and substantial investment in operations management technologies allow the company to provide unmatched levels of availability, performance, flexibility, and security. For more information on Data Return and its services, visit www.datareturn.com.

Challenge
Data Return has two lines of business it seeks to continually improve: 1) it is a managed services provider (MSP); and, 2) it offers IT operations outsourcing services. As an industry-leading MSP, Data Return helps customers such as Match.com and H&R Block efficiently manage their massive transactional platforms and database-driven applications with the utmost availability.

The primary challenge for the MSP business is to find cost-effective and industrial-strength IT solutions that efficiently maximize resources. “Our customers conduct some of the world’s heaviest transaction loads and therefore require industry-leading technology to ensure their systems are available, flexible, and fast. These customers typically plan for long-term growth and, as such, can sometimes over-engineer a project,” said Jason Lochhead, Co-founder and Principal Architect for Data Return. “Because much of their transactional workloads are seasonal, these companies can spend tens of thousands of dollars on infrastructure that is largely underutilized through a good portion of the year. We aimed to resolve this issue.”

Minimizing power consumption and cooling costs in the data center was also a critical concern for Data Return and its MSP business. Since most of its customers handle massive volumes of transactions, their infrastructures are based on powerful processors, databases, and application servers — all of which traditionally consume substantial amounts of energy. Since one of its data centers charged on a per-watt basis, Data Return needed industry-leading performance-per-watt solutions to help reduce costs and pass along those savings to customers.

In addition to improving its infrastructure, Data Return was also looking for a way to boost its IT outsourcing operations services via new offerings such as disaster recovery and support for 64-bit applications. The goal was to establish a flexible solution that could more easily, rapidly, and cost-effectively introduce new services to customers, while maintaining high availability of incumbent applications, even if they were 32-bit applications and the customer was migrating to 64-bit.

With its complex and world-class infrastructure, Data Return’s hosting clients include large, Fortune 500 companies that manage enormous volumes of information. MSPs are not usually an affordable option for smaller companies that require less computing power and have smaller IT budgets. However, Data Return knew there was an untapped market opportunity to serve smaller and mid-sized businesses with both managed hosting and comprehensive IT operations services. It planned to roll out a new utility-enabled managed services platform, called Infinistructure™, to court this new segment. Data Return needed a powerful but affordable computing platform on which to base the new service.

Virtualization technology appealed to the company as a potential solution to address these concerns. Virtualization, which improves IT efficiency by running multiple operating systems simultaneously on fewer servers, held the promise to extend the benefits of MSPs to small and mid-sized customers. The key was to implement a solution that delivered on the technology’s potential.

Solution
Data Return implemented a virtualization solution based on Dual-Core AMD Opteron™ processors running VMware® virtual infrastructure software on HP ProLiant® DL385 and DL585 servers.

“AMD, HP, and VMware solved the technical hurdles for true on-demand capabilities, creating a robust system that is highly available,” said Lochhead. “We have truly realized utility computing via the AMD Opteron processor-based servers. Our benchmarks proved the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor delivered the same, if not better, performance than competing technologies at a lower cost and with lower energy consumption.”

In addition to technological superiority, AMD’s product roadmap and long-term virtualization strategy helped cement the deal for the company. “AMD’s plans for hardware-based AMD Virtualization™ technology says to us, ‘AMD is going down the right path and they are willing to invest in virtualization’,” said Lochhead. “And AMD has a solid long-term product strategy with the AMD Opteron processor — it has a lengthy technology lifecycle that means customers can easily and affordably upgrade and scale up at their pace, not their vendor’s.”

Due to the virtualization capabilities enabled by AMD64 technology, the company was able to create Infinistructure, its first utility-enabled managed services platform. Infinistructure offered the ability to dynamically move running applications across physical servers transparently, maximizing performance and availability. Data Return could target small and medium-sized businesses with this flexible utility platform, offering Data Return’s customers powerful computing at an affordable price.

Impact
Since implementing the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based virtualization solution, Data Return has been widely acclaimed as a pioneer in virtualized hosting. The new solution delivered on the promise of reduced energy consumption, flexibility, high availability, and lower costs, resulting in improved service and new offerings such as disaster recovery. The AMD64-based infrastructure also provided the foundation for Infinistructure, successfully launched at the end of 2005, which has helped expand Data Return’s customer base.

Price/Performance
The Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor helped Data Return experience an overall lower total cost of ownership (TCO) via a lower initial purchase price, reduced administration challenges, improved licensing schemas, and more efficient energy usage.

“When our customers need robust processing power they have two options,” said Lochhead. “They can run a database powered by a costly infrastructure or run the same applications with four Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors — at half the cost due to hardware price point and multi-core licensing advantages. This is one of the many reasons why the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor is our processor of choice.”

Data Return realized additional cost savings through more efficient licensing. Because Microsoft® and VMware charge per-socket, Data Return was able to procure twice the processing capacity with the same cost of software, which further controlled costs.

Performance-per-watt
To power its business, Data Return maintains three data centers: Dallas, Texas; Pleasanton, California; and London, England. The company needed to optimize data center usage by maximizing server density power and cooling needs.

The energy efficiencies of the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor helped Data Return achieve a smaller footprint with greater rack density, and power savings were even greater with virtualization software, making it possible to run more servers on fewer physical machines. “The combination of the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor’s low power requirements and Infinistructure’s virtualized architecture gives us significant improvement in rack density,” Lochhead said. “This helps maximize space and keep power and cooling bills low. We would never have been able to achieve that density with a competing solution.”

Flexibility and Speed
Data Return partitioned each individual server into separate virtual machines, allowing the company to conduct various diverse tasks on one machine. This ensures a server is fully optimized — even when deploying new solutions or shifting resources. In a physical environment, it typically take weeks or months to reconfigure a server, requiring procurement, racking, operating system installation, etc. But, according to Lochhead, “Our Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based virtualization solution has cut days out of the deployment cycle. For example, we knew a customer of ours was going to be featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, so we were able to quickly and easily shift computing resources to support the predicted spike in usage of the company’s Web site after the episode aired. This works well with companies who have seasonal surges such as H&R Block as well.”

The flexibility has also allowed the company to more easily and cost-effectively deliver new services such as disaster recovery. Rather than create a costly mirror image architecture to support a primary site, a minimal array of Infinistructure servers can be deployed at a second site as part of the solution at a significantly lower incremental cost. If Data Return needs to respond to a failure, it can quickly switch over to the failover location and deploy additional capacity as needed.

64-bit Support
Data Return cited the unique ability of the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor to support both 32- and 64-bit applications simultaneously without forcing customers into costly upgrades. “Our customers know that the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor allows them to run 32-bit applications as well as 64-bit applications, so when they are ready to migrate to 64-bit, they can do so seamlessly without having to re-invest,” Lochhead stated.

Increased Company Growth
“The Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor provides powerful computing without high costs, which has allowed us to successfully pursue new markets,” said Lochhead. “Since launching Infinistructure, we are adding several new customers per month. This has exceeded our growth projections and we are well ahead of schedule.”

“The Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor combines pure, enterprise-class processing with scalable economics — an unusual feat in today’s market. By implementing a virtualization solution based on AMD64 technology, we have created a highly available and flexible environment with outstanding price/performance and performance-per-watt gains, which has allowed us to improve service and expand our customer base.” — said Jason Lochhead, Co-founder and Principal Architect, Data Return

About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is a leading global provider of innovative microprocessor solutions for computing, communications and consumer electronics markets. Founded in 1969, AMD is dedicated to delivering superior computing solutions based on customer needs that empower users worldwide. For more information visit www.amd.com.

AMD, AMD Opteron, the AMD Arrow logo, AMD Virtualization and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the US and/or other jurisdictions. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.