WORLDWIDE COMPANY CONSOLIDATES DATA CENTERS TO DELIVER ON GLOBAL SERVICES VISION

ORGANIZATION: CEB Inc.

HEADQUARTERS: Arlington, Va.

EMPLOYEES: 4,100

I.T. OPERATIONS STAFF: 62

DESCRIPTION: CEB is a best-practice insight and technology company. In partnership with leading organizations around the globe, it develops innovative solutions to drive corporate performance. CEB equips more than 10,000 companies with the intelligence to effectively manage talent, customers and operations, including 90 percent of the Fortune 500, nearly 75 percent of the Dow Jones Asian Titans and more than 85 percent of the FTSE 100. Learn more at cebglobal.com.

At a Glance

As CEB expands into new markets, its IT department takes advantage of virtualization and converged infrastructure to build a private cloud that serves customers and employees.

CASE STUDY

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Companies around the globe turn to CEB for best-practice

insights and solutions to better manage their business

operations and talent. But when it comes to technology,

these organizations don’t have to look any further than

CEB’s own IT department to learn how best to optimize

data center operations.

CEB, based in Arlington, Va., acquired a handful of

companies several years ago to expand its portfolio of

services. As a consequence of this acquisition spree, CEB

saw its data centers mushroom from two to 16 worldwide.

The newly integrated company had a hodgepodge of

technology with many different makes of servers and storage

equipment. Although 67 percent of its applications were

virtualized, most virtual machines (VMs) operated in silos.

For that reason, in 2014, with guidance from a team of

systems engineers at CDW, CEB’s IT department decided to

make a fresh start and opted to build a private cloud to host

its customer-facing and internal applications. In the process,

it would consolidate data center operations to six locations.

“We wanted to build a fully virtualized environment, and

to do that, we needed to standardize on hardware in our

facilities across the globe,” says Duke Tunstall, head of global

IT operations for CEB. CEB standardized on VCE’s Vblock

Systems converged infrastructure, an integrated solution of

preconfigured Cisco Systems UCS blade servers, EMC storage,

VMware software and Cisco switches that are easy to deploy.

The new equipment, combined with virtualization,

has allowed CEB to increase its hardware utilization and

consolidate its data centers, resulting in lower energy bills,

reduced facilities costs and overall IT savings.

Furthermore, the new private cloud infrastructure has

improved application performance, increased data security

and is much easier to manage. It has also allowed the IT

staff to take full advantage of virtualization’s benefits, from

the ability to spin up virtual servers quickly to improved

disaster recovery, says Ian Horne, director of CEB’s

member and production infrastructure.

“What allows me to sleep better at night is that we now

have a managed baseline. The equipment in each new

data center is essentially identical. That provides stability

and a foundation we can build upon,” Horne says. “And as

a global company, we needed to make sure we had rapid

failover and higher availability in each region, and we’re

accomplishing that.”

Why Converged Infrastructure? Don Wiegner, the former head of CEB global enterprise

technology, spent more than a year developing a new

data center strategy after CEB purchased U.K.-based

SHL during the summer of 2012. The purchase of SHL,

which added cloud talent management and measurement

services to the CEB arsenal, was the last of five company

acquisitions over a three-year period.

He and his team took inventory of technology at the 16

data centers. The diverse assembly included a wide variety

of storage systems from several vendors, including direct-

attached storage, network-attached storage and storage

area networks. Much of the gear was nearing end of life.

Next, the IT team analyzed business requirements

and determined that CEB needed a scalable, unified IT

infrastructure — either through a commercial cloud service

provider or by building its own private cloud.

During that time, the IT department purchased and

tested numerous configurations from several server and

storage vendors, and in the process, consolidated six small

data centers that had about three to five racks each.

“We did a lot of planning and assessments to figure out

what our go-forward plan should be,” recalls Wiegner, who

recently left CEB to become CIO of Mariner Finance. “These

test runs included building out smaller test cases, and these

six data centers were much smaller and were absorbed into

the test-run infrastructure.”

After doing return on investment analysis on all its

options, CEB’s IT department decided that building its own

private cloud using Vblock converged infrastructure was

the most efficient, cost-effective approach.

VCE, a joint venture between Cisco and EMC with

investments from VMware and Intel, offers a cloud

infrastructure system whose server, storage and networking

components are preintegrated, tested and validated.

CASE STUDY

50%The boost in application performance after CEB built a new private cloud using VCE Vblock equipment in its data centers

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Now that CEB has built its private cloud, the company’s

IT leaders are working to make the new IT infrastructure

as effective and efficient as possible. Their goal this year?

Automate as many routine IT tasks as possible, including

the full lifecycle of virtual machines.

“What we are trying to get to is when someone puts in a

request through a portal, it creates a ticket that is vetted

and approved by the IT teams that manage those aspects

of the infrastructure. And once those approvals are done,

we kick off scripts that will auto-deploy the requested

machines,” says Ian Horne, director of CEB’s member and

production infrastructure.

CEB’s IT staff use a combination of scripts and custom

and off-the-shelf software to automate these IT tasks,

including Microsoft System Center Orchestrator, which is

workflow management software for the data center, and

HP Service Manager, which handles everything from help

desk ticket tracking to change management.

“By automating some day-to-day mundane tasks, we

want to free up our engineers to work on more important

projects,” says Duke Tunstall, head of global IT operations

for CEB.

CEB Focuses on IT Automation

Before, when CEB owned multiple storage systems,

there were times when the IT staff would upgrade the

firmware on a Cisco Nexus switch and one storage array

would have problems, while another array wouldn’t.

Those problems are now a thing of the past because VCE

tests the software of all the system components and

documents compatibility.

“The great thing about Vblock is that they did

configuration testing. The headaches of managing

infrastructure at the component level are removed from

the equation, so you can deploy rapidly,” Horne says.

In the fall of 2013, CEB finalized its strategy to build a

private cloud by consolidating the 10 remaining legacy

data centers into the six new data centers: two each in the

United States, the United Kingdom and the Asia-Pacific

region (Australia and China). And it wanted to do it fast:

starting deployment in January 2014 and migrating to the

private cloud within eight months.

More specifically, CEB wanted to build the U.S., U.K. and

Australian data centers in 2014 and then, in 2015, stand up a

new data center in China, an emerging market for the company.

Fast Deployment “We wanted to take care of it in one fell swoop and

absolutely have no customer impact,” says Tunstall, who

joined the company in the fall of 2013 and was put in charge

by Wiegner to coordinate the project’s implementation.

During planning meetings, vendors initially told CEB that

the eight-month implementation time frame was next to

impossible, but the company’s IT leaders knew they could

do it because they had a global IT workforce that could

work around the clock.

For example, IT workers in Australia would do

implementation work, and at the end of their workday,

they’d hand off the reins to colleagues in India. Then, at

the end of the workday in India, the U.K and later the U.S.

IT staffers would take over. The result: CEB worked on the

project 24 hours a day, five days a week.

“We pretty much followed the sun,” Tunstall says. “Once

the workday in one location was over, they’d hand it over to

the next teammate to keep the implementation going.”

Prior to the cloud project, CEB had learned firsthand that a

Vblock converged infrastructure could be deployed rapidly.

It had an urgent business requirement and used Vblock to

build a new data center in the U.K. in three months.

The company’s European customers were concerned

about data privacy and wanted all their data to remain in

Europe and not backed up abroad, so as a quick stopgap,

CEB built the new U.K. data center in early 2013 for data

backup and recovery purposes.

“We were live in 90 days, so we knew we could get it

done,” Horne says. “The scale of the private cloud project

was larger, but as long as you have the people and an

understanding of the applications and infrastructure, the

process was very much the same.”

CDW’s account managers, solution architects and

engineers assisted CEB every step of the way, from

planning and delivering systems and services to attending

weekly meetings during implementation to ensure

everything was going smoothly, CEB’s IT leaders say.

CDW Executive Account Manager Billy Stowe

collaborated with Cisco and EMC representatives to help

CEB design its Vblock infrastructure.

“The CEB team had a good idea of what their strategy

was but needed us to make the puzzle pieces fit together

and help figure out the best approach,” Stowe says.

Meanwhile, Adam Carreno, a CDW aggregation

infrastructure managed-services specialist, helped CEB

broker deals for wide area network and Internet service

as well as new cost-effective colocation facilities. He even

toured the colocation facilities with CEB’s IT team.

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communities to validate the ideas we had,” Horne says. “It

was highly valuable to have access to technical people who

are very familiar with what we were trying to do.”

Private Cloud BenefitsCEB is already noting a decent ROI from virtualization and

the new infrastructure.

Today, 97 percent of its applications are virtualized. The

company has seen an increase in application performance

and benefits from a more streamlined data center

infrastructure that’s much easier to manage and maintain,

resulting in better customer service, Tunstall says.

For example, CEB’s IT staff now have the option to move

applications between data centers while doing server

maintenance. And if a department requests 70 virtual

servers, the IT team can spin up the servers in a few hours.

In the past, that process would have taken days or weeks.

“When a request comes in, we know immediately what

CPU, memory and storage capacity we have available and

whether we can fill it in the data center requested or if we have

to fill it from another location globally,” Wiegner says. “Before,

we had to figure out where that piece of the puzzle would fit

in our hodgepodge of infrastructure around the globe.”

With VMware vRealize Operations software, the IT

department can identify and recover server and storage

resources no longer in use, so they can be reused for other

needs. “That’s been a cost saver,” Wiegner said. “In the

past, without a unified architecture model, it was hard to

see the holistic picture.”

CEB’s IT staff plans to continue making improvements

to the private cloud implementation. This year, they are

putting the finishing touches on the new data center in

China and building two-way data replication between sites

to improve disaster recovery.

The company has applications running in each data

center. In the United States, if one data center goes down,

applications immediately fail over to the second data

center. Similarly, the two U.K. sites mirror each other, while

the Australia and China data centers will automatically fail

over to the U.S. sites.

“Our systems are more reliable,” Tunstall says. “It gives

our business units the confidence that their applications

are going to be stable.”

“After gathering all of CEB’s requirements, I helped

evaluate and compile technical responses from the

relevant telecom and colocation providers,” Carreno

says. “Our industry knowledge helped bring the right

providers to the table, significantly reducing sourcing and

procurement cycles.”

When implementation began in January 2014, CEB

focused on building out the U.K. data centers first. The IT

staff retrofitted and upgraded the previous newly built

data center and built a second data center within two

weeks of equipment delivery.

Next, they ported the data from the legacy data

centers to the new data centers, and built VMs from

scratch. Each application underwent an architectural

review to make sure everything was current, valid and

secure, Horne says.

Step-by-Step SuccessThrough a phased approach, CEB flipped the switch and

migrated customers and employees to the new data

centers in the U.K., U.S. and Australia over the summer.

In the end, the company met its goal and completed

the migration in eight months with no problems and no

customer impact.

“We changed the DNS settings, pointed customers

to the new sites, and they never knew the difference,”

Tunstall says.

CEB’s IT leaders say they couldn’t have completed the

project without CDW’s assistance. “CDW was very adept at

putting us in contact with the right people within our vendor

Learn more about data center optimization strategies

at cdw.com/datacenter.Stev

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“ Vblock makes life much easier. It removes a lot of the risks of trying to manage the infrastructure at the component level.”

– Ian Horne, Director of CEB’s Member and Production Infrastructure