HPE JG554A Getting Started Guide
Objective
Create a platform to deliver swift, secure
and reliable hosting for customers
Approach
Researched the market for a solution
that would provide sophisticated
automation beyond the Operating
System level
Case Study
Phoenix cuts provisioning
times for cloud platforms
HPE Software Professional Services delivers
successful cloud automation project
IT Matters
• Reduces platform delivery times from
days to just hours
• Eliminates error and misconfiguration
by delivering modular, repeatable
solutions
• Increases the eiciency of customer
support through uniform blueprints
and reference architectures
Business Matters
• Speeds time-to-market and increases
the competitive oering
• Promotes new business through
HPE Professional Services support
and roadmap
• Enables Phoenix to oer highly flexible
and reliable services to its customers
When Managed Service
Provider Phoenix launched
its new CloudSure UK
service, the main aim was to
oer quicker provisioning
times for new customers.
Automation was the answer
and Phoenix now delivers
that with HPE CloudSystem
Enterprise and HPE
Cloud Service Automation
solutions. The success
of this enterprise has
been underpinned by
HPE Professional Services.
Challenge
Supporting ambitious growth curve
Phoenix was formed in 1979 to design
and manufacture hardware but following
a proactive history of acquisitions and
mergers it has now grown into one of the
UK’s leading IT service providers. Its 15 data
centres across the UK include five main
hosting sites and can house 1,996 server
racks, managing 529TB of data for over
3,300 businesses. Also operating 23 regional
sites in the UK, including business continuity
centres, Phoenix employs over 2,300 sta
and its call centres dealt with 293,296 calls
in 2013/14.
Case study
Phoenix
“Delivering the infrastructure for a typical Platform-as-a-Service customer
used to take up to fifteen days. That process has now been shortened to a
matter of hours.”
– Mark Scaife, head of technical development, Phoenix
Industry
Managed hosting
and IT services
Page 2
The success of Phoenix is based on the
breadth of its portfolio which is designed
to meet all customer requirements. In the
early days, it oered traditional services
supporting local servers on customer sites
and in its own UK-based data centres
and provided printer, desktop and client
support as well as Local Area Network
(LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN)
centric services. Now its oering includes
Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-asa-Service, Storage-as-a-Service, Backupas-a-Service, cloud backup, replication and
storage services.
Phoenix implemented its first cloud-style
service over eight years ago when it oered
Platform-as-a-Service on a virtual shared
platform using the VMware Hypervisor.
Since then its cloud progress has been
an evolution rather than a revolution.
It added two further VMware vSphere
platforms, but as the importance of cloud
gathered momentum, it needed a more
sophisticated solution.
“We wanted to speed up the delivery of
customer environments because previously,
this was a very manual task,” explains Mark
Scaife, head of technical development at
Phoenix. “We needed to reduce the amount
of professional services we had to sell on to
customers by introducing more automation.”
Solution
Professional Services are key
Phoenix considered various vendors and
chose an HPE Converged Infrastructure
aligned architecture based on HPE
CloudSystem Enterprise, overlaid with HPE
Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software
and delivered by HPE Software Professional
Services. It’s now marketed under the
Phoenix brand name of CloudSure UK.
“Phoenix and Hewlett Packard Enterprise
have a long-standing relationship that goes
back many years,” explains Scaife. “It was
a natural selection because most of the
competition oered automation but not to
the level that we wanted it. Often automation
solutions go to an operating system level,
but we wanted to take it to the next step
by having our monitoring agents, anti-virus
and set up for our patching and deployment
paths so that if a customer came along and
wanted Microsoft® Exchange or Microsoft®
SQL for example, automation would enable
us to deliver those in line with Microsoft and
HPE best practices. We really liked what the
HPE solution gave us in terms of flexibility
and assisting us in standing services up
quickly. Because of our relationship with
HPE, we also knew that we could rely on
them to deliver and ensure that we had
relevant sta available on site to help us
get the solution up and running as quickly
as possible.”
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