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.”
Case study
Phoenix
Industry
Managed hosting
and IT services
Page 3
HPE Software Professional Services
delivered this functionality utilising
HPE Cloud Maps, a set of pre-configured
settings for HPE CSA that accelerated
the implementation and time to value
for Phoenix.
The Phoenix HPE CloudSystem Enterprise
solution consists of an HPE BladeSystem
c7000 Enclosure housing HPE ProLiant
BL465 Gen8 server blades with top of rack
connection from the HPE 5900 Switch
Series and an HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400
Storage platform. The infrastructure is
managed from an HPE CloudSystem Matrix
operating environment and HPE CSA
software enables the hybrid delivery of cloud
solutions. Storage and backup are managed
with HPE StoreOnce Backup and HPE Data
Protector Software.
“Once we had selected Hewlett Packard
Enterprise as a vendor, HPE and Phoenix
were both keen to put their best people
forward for this joint exercise to make sure
that it was a successful platform and that
it delivered what we were asking for,” says
Scaife. “Right from the get-go the resource
allocated to this was quite heavy. HPE
Professional Services assigned a technical
design architect to work with me for Phoenix
and he had a really good understanding
of the whole hardware and software stack.
He made it really easy to come up with the
finalised designs of how we wanted it to
look and Phoenix were keen everything was
highly available, resilient and expandable in
the future.”
“HPE also supplied a project manager
who was fully conversant with the inner
workings of One HPE. He did a really good
job of making sure that everything worked
well together, making sure we hit project
milestones and keeping the project on track.
We had people working on the platform
from as far away as Brazil and HPE also flew
specialists over from Amsterdam.”
Benefits
Flexible, reliable oering
The HPE solution has enabled Phoenix to
achieve its key aims of flexibility and speed
of deployment for customer infrastructures.
“The benefits we are seeing are primarily
around our platform delivery times. It used
to take between ten and 15 days to stand
up the infrastructure for a typical Platformas-a-Service customer and that process has
now been shortened to a matter of hours,”
says Scaife. “We are a big service provider
with a lot of architects and they all had their
own ideas of how they build infrastructures
for customers. Delivering automation with
the HPE solution has enabled us to bring
uniformity into the business by ensuring that
everyone’s solutions are delivered in exactly
the same way. Building things to the same
professional standards also means that our
support teams know exactly what they’re
getting every time with the same blueprint
and the same reference architecture backed
by the same service description and that’s
vitally important.”
Case study
Phoenix
Industry
Managed hosting
and IT services
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE CloudSystem Enterprise
• HPE BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure
• HPE ProLiant BL465 Gen8
server blades
• HPE 5900 Switch Series
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400 Storage
• HPE CloudSystem Matrix
operating environment
Software
• HPE Cloud Service Automation
• HPE StoreOnce Backup
• HPE Data Protector
HPE services
• HPE Professional Services
“Whenever HPE Professional Services came up against any
deployment issues, they quickly brought in the right
people, so we have a solution that worked well and that
we could both be proud of.”
– Mark Scaife, head of technical development, Phoenix
“The automation engine in HPE
CloudSystem Enterprise enables us to
deliver a Platform-as-a-Service server which
has been pre-set with all the management
agents for anti-virus, patching and is
connected to our monitoring solution.
This modular deployment matches our
business processes and is exactly the
same every time, so there’s no room for
error or misconfiguration. Every reference
architecture has been created in detail
and the process matched to the
automation logic.
“All our customers are bespoke in some
way, so there is still some post-deployment
work to do but with the HPE CloudSystem
Enterprise toolset, rather than doing the
preconfiguration manually for each customer
we are doing it inside CSA – so when the
next customer comes along and wants
the same customisation, we have already
automated it. That is further reducing our
stand-up times because we’re capturing
everything in automation, getting the
business process and logistics right and
making sure it goes through all our change
and compliance systems. We are just going
to keep seeing the benefits of this as we get
further and further into the solution.”
HPE Professional Services are now
regarded as a trusted advisor for Phoenix
and its input has been one of the major
foundations for the success of the project.
Through its inherent design of the platform,
HPE Professional Services has ensured
that Phoenix will be able to bring CSA
functionality such as Lifecycle Management
and Extensible Architecture online when the
business is ready to transition to them.
“This was the first time that we had
really attacked the cloud market with any
purpose and using the experience of HPE
Professional Services helped reduce time
to market for CloudSure UK,” adds Scaife.
“The HPE team was very professional.”
Hewlett Packard Enterprise remains close
to Phoenix to ensure that the platform
is successful. Its specialists join Phoenix
customer meetings to demonstrate the
solution’s capabilities and it has produced a
future roadmap showing how HPE solutions
can help Phoenix achieve its future
business aims.
Learn more at
hpe.com/software/csaservices
Sign up for updates
Rate this document
© Copyright 2014, 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without
notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of the Microsoft group of companies.
4AA5-5607EEW, March 2016, Rev. 1
Loading...