Supported by

Ashok SethiCIO-Sapient Corporation

Vol 1Issue 1

Customer Profile

Company: Sapient CorporationIndustry Services & Consulting

Country: India

Employees: 10,000

Website: www.sapient.com

Business needSapient Corporation wanted to migrate employees to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 and needed a highly stable, virtualized storage infrastructure to deliver improved communications across the global organization.

SolutionThe company deployed a storagearchitecture based on Dell™EqualLogic SANs to support theperformance of their unifiedcommunications platform.

Benefits• Return on investment expected within six months• Improves user productivity with integrated communications platform• Scales to meet expanding storage demands due to increased collaboration• Reduced maintenance enables delivery of strategic projects

Solutions Featured• Email

• Storage Virtualization

• Unified Communications

Communications giant connects global employees Sapient migrates to unified communication platform to delivernew collaboration possibilities

CIOInsights

“Dell was able to help us define what our core issues were and how best to solve the problems we were facing. They understood our roadmap and suggested solutions that would meet ourinitial needs and prompted us to consider wider ranging areas relating to what our future requirements could be.”

Ashok Sethi, CIO, Sapient Corporation

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Technology at work

Services

Dell™ Support Services– Dell ProSupport™ MissionCritical with 4-hour OnsiteResponse

Hardware

Dell EqualLogic PS6010Xand PS6510X storage areanetwork (SAN)Dell EqualLogic PS6510Estorage area network

Software

Microsoft® ExchangeServer 2010Microsoft® Lync™ 2010

With their business strategy focused on both organic and inorganic growth, Sapient has made a number of strategic acquisitions to ensure the company can support their customers to generate tangible business results. Critical to their success is ensuring an integrated IT infrastructure across the company’s global locations. Ashok Sethi, CIO, Sapient Corporation, comments, “We were running older versions of our core business applications and we wanted to migrate our users to thelatest platforms to improve end user productivity. We were looking for a complete solution that would support continued innovation.”

Sapient held discussions with a number of vendors to deliver a scalable, robust architecture to support the Exchange Server 2010 environment. The company’s long-term partnership with Dell led to a number of strategic conversations prior to the project commencement. “Dell was able to help us define what our core issues were and how best to solve the problems we were facing. They understood our roadmap and suggested solutions that would meet our initial needs, as wellas prompting us to consider widerranging areas relating to what our future requirements could be,” says Sethi.

Platform migration delivers access to latest communication toolsThe company has centralised theirtechnology infrastructure and resources for all global locations

out of the India offices. The company had been faced with unscheduled downtime and reduced performance due to theaging infrastructure, as well as limited mailbox capacity for users. Delivering a highly available platform was viewed as critical to improving productivity and collaboration. Therefore, Sapientwanted to migrate all users fromMicrosoft® Exchange Server 2007 toMicrosoft® Exchange Server 2010.Manvinder Oberoi, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Services, explains, “We wanted to give our users access to the latest communication tools such as archival features, presence, instant messaging, and video and voice conferencing. We also realised that the amount of information flowing between our users was increasing, and we needed the storage capacity to cost-effectively archive this data.”

Sapient Corporation (Sapient) is a NASDAQ listed global services company at the forefront of delivering marketing and technology innovation across their three divisions, SapientNitro, Sapient Global Markets, and Sapient GovernmentServices. Sapient has approximately 10,000 employees in over 35 locations across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, with a majority of their workforce based in India

CIOInsights

“Our users needed access to the latestcommunication tools such as archival features,presence, instant messaging, and video and voiceconferencing. With the amount of information increasing, we needed cost-effective storage to archive this data.”

Manvinder Oberoi, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Services,Sapient Corporation

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Virtualized storage infrastructure meets projected growth of communication dataSapient selected Dell EqualLogicPS6510X virtualized iSCSI storagearea networks (SANs) to support the Exchange Server 2010 in environments in India and the United States, a Dell EqualLogic PS6010X virtualized iSCSI SAN solution for the company’s privatecloud environment, and Dell EqualLogic PS6510E SAN for storing their file data. One of the key reasons that Sapient chose Dell EqualLogic for their storage is that the solution met the company’s demands for green efficiency, a value reflected in the company’s newest green building in Noida, India. “We are a socially responsible organization and while operational cost is a consideration, we strive to ensure our company is as energy efficient as possible,” says Sethi.

Sapient’s storage strategy is designed to ensure the company is supported by world-class data storage, recovery and archival capabilities. A proof of concept conducted by Dell in Sapient’s Boston headquarters gave the team confidence that the solution would scale to meet the company’s projected growth and work seamlessly with the existing infrastructure. Virtualizationhas brought added benefits with fast set up of new project environments for globally based teams and the ability to release resources for new projects just as quickly.

Dell ProSupport™ Mission Critical with 4-hour Onsite Response service protects the company and their communications environment. Sethi comments, “Due to the support we

Increased productivity leads to responsive serviceUser feedback has been extremelypositive, particularly around the noticeable productivity improvements that have resulted from utilization of the new platform features. “Our users have been enthusiastic about the fact that their communication tools are always available. With the increased storage capacity users can automatically archive information, which has definitely improved productivity and our responsiveness to customers,” says Oberoi.

Return on investment is achievable within six months of deploymentSethi has presented his return on investment (ROI) projections to the Sapient management team. “We are very optimistic we can meet our ROI within six months, which has given the management team greater confidence in investing in new projects on which we may partner with Dell, that will innovate our service delivery,” concludes Sethi.

CIOInsights

had through the deployment phase and during roll out, we’ve yet to encounter issues requiring support. It’s about having the reassurance that we have people available that we can count on.”

Improved stability leads to fulfilment of strategic projects Sapient has migrated all mailboxesto Exchange Server 2010, and is now benefiting from improved collaboration from instant messaging and desktop sharing features. Due to the stability of the solution, even with a lean IT team in place at the company, team members who were previously responsible for managing the Exchange Server 2007 environment have been able to focus on new projects. As a result, Sapient is in the process of completing a Microsoft® Lync 2010 server rollout. “Due to the stability of the system we were able to migrate all mailboxes to Exchange Server 2010 within three to four months, which has freed up our time. Other vendors projected this would take between six months to one year to complete,” says Oberoi.

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The debate over which shared storage interconnect to deploy – Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI – rages on, from boardrooms and back offices to the blogosphere. Fibre Channel provides low latency and high availability, making it the ideal storage platform for many business-critical applications. But for other organizations, FC can be overly expensive and complex to manage. For these organizations, iSCSI can better streamline implementation, simplify management, and improve affordability than Fibre Channel, thanks to the universality of TCP/IP. Adding to the discussion is the emergence of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and the increasing acceptance of 10 Gb iSCSI. So how do you choose?

● Dell believes that you should have the freedom to choose the network fabric that’s right for you – not only within one SAN, but across your enterprise. This includes the flexibility to change technologies as business needs change or to implement new technologies as they become available. In other words, choose the technology that’s right for you based on your existing infrastructure and business needs – not on what your storage vendor recommends – keeping in mind how those needs may change over time.

● Organizations need the flexibility to choose between FC and iSCSI server connectivity to optimize storage resources in accordance with their unique needs. Your organization may standardize on FC to deliver the performance required for select applications, or on iSCSI to enable the cost-effective addition of new devices to your storage area network. Dell provides highly scalable, standards-based hardware architectures with flexible options for end-to-end server, networking and storage connectivity over Ethernet or Fibre Channel networks. One means of reducing technology risk is to use these architectures to mix and match server interfaces and drive technologies within your SAN in a way that lets you easily adopt new technologies as they become available. A converged network design that is flexible to handle LAN, iSCSI and FCoE is the basis of flexible choices. For more detailed information on Dell Virtual Network Architecture, see this whitepaper.

● This white paper will explore three reasons why you need to simplify networking fabrics in a way that keeps your options open for new requirements and technologies. Customer examples will illustrate how these three reasons play out in the real world.

iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel SANS: Three reasons not to choose sides A discussion of storage networking technologies and the importance of technology flexibility within the data center fabric

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EXECUTIVE

SUMMARY

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Reason One: Each Technology Has Its Place

“We have Fibre Channel capability with Dell Compellent as well as iSCSI, I wanted to make sure that we could adapt to any situation.” Luther BowensSystems and Operations Manager, Information Technology Division, Indianapolis Public Schools

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unique networking challenges. Indiana Public Schools offers an insightful example.

Think for a moment about the money and time you’d need to provide every resident of a medium-sized city with reliable access to computing resources, and to maintain those resources over their lifecycles. With more than 30,000 students, Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS), Indiana’s largest school district, must accomplish essentially the same task— with the additional responsibility of making sure the infrastructure can capably support education and keep up with change.

“We like flexibility,” says Luther Bowens, systems and operations manager, Information Technology Division, Indianapolis Public Schools. “If we do not have the foresight and capability to grow as our students grow and as the world changes, then we run the risk of becoming stagnant.”

To gain more flexibility in the way it delivers desktop computing resources to students, faculty and staff, the district launched a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiative with VMware® View, Windows™ Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. “We need to give users access to the latest technology, but we also want to save money. With VDI, we can take an eight-year-old machine, strip it down, and run Windows 7 on it with no problems,” says Bowens. The HP LeftHand iSCSI-based storage in which the district had a significant investment could not provide the input/output operations per second (IOPS) necessary to host the virtual desktops and ensure good performance. “It’s not that I

couldn’t run VDI on LeftHand, it’s that I needed to do it quickly,” says Bowens.

After reviewing storage solutions from Dell, IBM, EMC and HP, Bowens selected a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN with 11 SSDs and 16 SAS drives. “I was confident that we would get the IOPS we needed with Dell Compellent, and the perpetual software licensing model also made Dell Compellent very, very attractive,” he says. “That makes it cheaper as we expand because we don’t have to re-buy a license each time we upgrade. All we have to do is buy hardware. I think that’s awesome. We have the flexibility to grow our virtual desktop initiative efficiently and cost-effectively, while maintaining good performance with Dell Compellent. We’re running 5,500 virtual desktops on just 11 SSDs, and that’s only the beginning.”

The choice of connectivity protocols supported by Dell Compellent also appealed to the district. “We have Fibre Channel capability with Dell Compellent as well as iSCSI,” says Bowens. “I wanted to make sure that we could adapt to any situation.”

In order to design storage solutions that meet their unique needs, users need the latitude to utilize iSCSI connectivity when manageability and cost are the key criteria, and to opt for FC when availability and performance are paramount.

With the emergence of Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards, it is now practical to access high-performance storage devices over a converged broadband IP network while leveraging the economies of low-cost Ethernet switches and IP routers. DCB accommodates the migration of an expanding list of traffic types to 10GbE through the ability to classify and prioritize different data flows, thus reducing the number of failure points in an Ethernet network and, consequently, the overall cost of networking. In data center fabrics running Ethernet at rates of 10Gb and higher, DCB puts iSCSI on a par with FC in terms of network speed. This in turn brings a number of new variables into the cost/performance equation.

As an active contributor to the standard, Dell has helped to drive DCB capabilities to offer organizations unprecedented flexibility to choose the right storage technology for their specific requirements. With many technologies still maturing, most organizations are taking a measured, calculated approach to their deployment strategies, starting with small, segregated pilot projects. For others, however, the decision is more clear-cut. Organizations with multiple departments or applications, each with different connectivity requirements, can often face

When it comes to storage network selection, many organizations tend to commit over the long term to the technology in place today. However, with today’s rapidly evolving performance capabilities, many companies have begun to take a wider view of their technology options, and to broaden their long-term perspectives. For all its advantages as a purpose-designed storage interconnect, FC implementations can sometimes raise cost and complexity issues that place it beyond the reach of some companies. Dell believes many such companies can turn to iSCSI to architect shared storage solutions they cannot afford to implement with FC. One such solution – remote replication – offers an instructive example of this; many organizations

associated with many leading FC storage vendors’ offerings.

But remote replication over IP-based wide area networks (WANs) can provide robust, easy-to-use disaster recovery solutions without the complexity or cost associated with FC-based solutions, and bringing business continuance within reach for companies of nearly any size. With IP-based replication, organizations can leverage existing networks and infrastructures, while IT teams proficient in TCP/IP basics can benefit from simple setup and management.

Serviceplan Group, headquartered in Munich, is the largest owner-managed media agency in Germany. Founded in 1970, its services

data storage strategies as critical for business success. With so much at stake, the company decided to replace its existing FC-based NetApp® MetroCluster storage when it ran out of warranty. ”Since the business relies on IT – and the storage infrastructure, in particular – we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to look ahead and devise a better plan for scaling and replicating our storage,” says Stefan Reitmeier, Senior Network Administrator at Serviceplan Group.

After considering solutions offered by both NetApp and Dell, the Serviceplan Group decided to replace its aging NetApp MetroCluster with a Dell EqualLogic storage solution for its business-critical environment. The company deployed Dell EqualLogic PS6000XV arrays to store its production data and Dell EqualLogic PS6500E arrays at a secondary site for backup. The company uses this Dell EqualLogic solution to store both enterprise data – from its Microsoft® Exchange Server and Oracle databases – and virtual machine (VM) data from its virtualized environment, which is based on Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™. There are around 150 terabytes of data on the production storage arrays, which is replicated to the backup arrays every four to 24 hours and retained for 30 days.

Reitmeier says: “The cost of the MetroCluster solution was three times more than the Dell EqualLogic technology, yet we feel that we’ve got a more efficient storage solution from Dell.”

Reason Two: Affordability Can Put Technology Within Reach

“The cost of the MetroCluster solution was three times more than the Dell EqualLogic technology, yet we feel that we’ve got a more efficient storage solution from Dell.”

Stefan ReitmeierSenior Network Administrator at Serviceplan

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choose not to implement remote replication, despite its potential to extend application uptime and improve business continuity. These concerns often draw from storage administrators’ experiences with tape-based backup solutions, which have traditionally suffered from poor reliability. Yet organizations have also shied away from disk-based backup solutions, discouraged by the cost and complexity

cover all forms of media and communications. Today, the group has offices in nearly 30 locations, including Berlin, Buenos Aires and Beijing. Plus, it works with some of the world’s leading brands, such as BMW, Continental, E.ON, HiPP, Lufthansa, Miele and Sony Ericsson.

As both its user numbers and file sizes have grown in recent years, Serviceplan has come to regard its

As rapid change continues to define the technology and business landscapes, the conversation may very well shift over the next three years from FC-versus-iSCSI to some completely different technological debate. Investing in a solution limited solely to iSCSI or to FC can stifle innovation and block a business from adopting new technologies that may loom on the horizon. From a networking perspective, a converged network design that is flexible to handle LAN, iSCSI and FCoE provides the most options.

Consider Moss & Associates (Moss), a national construction, consulting and management firm that grew from 5 to 300 employees in only two years. With annual revenues that exceed $750 million, Moss is one of the largest construction companies in South Florida. As the business has expanded, its demand for storage capacity has grown exponentially. Moss has more than 20 estimators working on gigantic spreadsheets to estimate and quote new construction business. “If our employees can’t access the right file, we are losing thousands of dollars a minute,” says Bill Snow, IT Director, Moss & Associates.

“The robust feature set and excellent price point led us to choose a Dell Compellent Storage Center SAN,” says Snow. When Moss deployed the SAN it loaded all its data onto Tier 1 FC drives and enabled Dell Compellent Data Progression an automated data tiering feature. Within five to seven days, inactive data—which comprised nearly 80 percent of Moss’s data—automatically migrated down to higher-capacity drives. Moving inactive data off of

the high-speed drives freed up the SAN’s Tier 1 spindles, increasing Tier 1 performance by 60 percent.Moss is freed from technology risk by the standards-based Dell Compellent hardware architecture. The company can mix and match server interfaces and drive technologies, and can easily adopt new technologies as they become available. One key criterion in Moss’s storage selection decision was the ability of Compellent Solutions to support both iSCSI and high-performance connectivity simultaneously. Now Moss uses high-speed server connections for business-critical, performance-intensive SQL Server, Exchange Server and file server applications, while it uses iSCSI connections anywhere it doesn’t need extreme performance.

“High-speed drives give us proven performance, and iSCSI allows us to overcome distance limitations and replicate to a co-location facility 60 miles away,” says Snow. “We get the best of both worlds, without being locked into any given technology, because of the technology independence of the Dell Compellent SAN.”

Dell Position: Simplify data center fabric to achieve the most flexibility

The exponential increase in bandwidth enabled by the rapid adoption of network fabrics running Ethernet at 10Gb and higher brings new urgency to efforts to architect multi-service data center network fabrics. While iSCSI storage networking is now well accepted as a solution businesses shouldn’t be to take sides when investing in shared storage. You should have the freedom to choose based on your specific application needs and environmental particulars. This philosophy drives the introduction of innovative products like the Dell Networking S5000 Converged LAN/

Reason Three: Avoid Technology Lock-in

FCoE and iSCSI. It is modular to enable a scale-out growth and is part of the Dell Active Fabric approach.

The emergence of broadband fabrics offers a tremendous opportunity to help you to both architect data center solutions that suit your specific needs and environments and incorporate newer technologies as they mature. DCB is a vital enabler in this regard, offering a standard means to reduce complexity while adding robust, unified, high-throughput networking capabilities for today’s dynamic, high-volume data traffic patterns. Dell has contributed to DCB standards as part of a larger mission to enable high performance, reliability and affordability for both iSCSI and FC storage operations over mixed-traffic Ethernet fabrics running at 10GB and higher. Dell offers a range of topologies and converged networking fabrics to help organizations build and manage modular, scalable, and cost-effective server and storage infrastructures.

By architecting solutions based upon Dell open, standards-based storage and networking platforms, IT organizations can improve the durability, agility and ROI of their strategic data center fabrics. Whether building a data center from the ground up or optimizing an existing infrastructure, organizations can benefit from Dell’s extensive product and services portfolio, as well as from Dell’s experience in helping customers of all sizes overcome a variety of IT challenges across all industries worldwide. A true single-vendor solution provider, Dell offers unique advantages as a developer of storage and networking technologies, and as a provider of an expansive suite of professional service offerings.

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In general, what would you say are your organization’s biggest challenges in terms of its storage environment? (Percent of respondents, N = 418)*

Today’s organizations face aconstant struggle to manage andprotect data. In fact, EnterpriseStrategy Group (ESG) researchshows that 90 percent of organizations surveyed are increasing or maintaining their spending on storage infrastructure for various reasons such as:

1. The volume of data continues to expand drastically as organizations gather increasing amounts of information and rely on digital processes to run their businesses. Technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing also demand scalable storage resources that are centralized and shared. Now, intelligent storage technologies,

such as scale-out and unified storage, are emerging to address those needs. The challenge for organizations is to contain costs while adopting advanced storage technologies to manage data growth.

More than one-quarter (28 percent)of respondents are currently using unified storage, a technology that consolidates file-based network attached storage (NAS) and block-based storage area networks (SANs).

2. By combining NAS and SAN, unified storage helps improve capacity utilization and simplify management, among other operational efficiencies. ESG’s research shows that unified storage

Data explosion calls for storage innovation

is well received, and it has the potential for widespread adoption.

When evaluating storage products,many organizations consider total cost of ownership (TCO) as a major factor. Over half (65 percent) of the respondentsindicated that capital expenditure— specifically, the cost of the storage infrastructure—was the most important cost consideration.

3. Because intelligent storage is designed to optimize the utilization of existing capacity, it helps rein in storage costs and enables businesses to defer capital expenditures on storage.

WhitePaper

Biggest storage challenges

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72%

of organizations interviewed used unified storage systems that consolidate file-based and block based access in a single storage platform.

Biggest storage challenges

In general, what would you say are your organization’s biggest challenges in terms of its storage environment? (Percent of respondents, N = 418)*

Important cost considerations for storage TCO calculation

Which of the following cost considerations that factor into a TCO calculation would you consider to be the most important?(Percent of respondents, N = 271)*

Current usage of unified storage systems

Does your organization use unified storage systems that consolidate file-based and block-based access in a single storage platform?(Percent of respondents, N = 418)*

WhitePaper

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Introducing DPACKIn an effort to help guide our customers through mission critical IT decisions, Dell’s team of solution experts have developed an innovative new tool - the Dell Performance Analysis Collection Kit or DPACK. Through a simply-run program, DPACK produces an output that gives you the confidence and knowledge you need to make the right decisions for your business. This complimentary tool will help you make the most impactful IT solution recommendations, whether it’s reducing wasteful spending or analyzing opportunities for virtualization or datacenter expansion. With DPACK, you can get a true sense of your current IT environment and identify areas for further optimization.

Understand your environmentDPACK runs remotely and agentless to gather core requirements such as

disk IO, throughput, capacity and memory utilization and produces an in-

depth view of server workload and capacity requirements.

DPACK has the ability to generate two kinds of reports: an aggregation

of resource needs across disparate servers with a simulation of those

workloads if consolidated to shared resources and an indepth

individual server report to be used by IT administrators to search for

potential bottlenecks or hotspots that need to be engineered out of a new

design.

With this tangible data, a Solutions Architect can help you look for ways to

optimize your data center and plan for upcoming critical projects. During

this conversation, you will also be supplied with a detailed report and the

resulting accumulated metrics and what they mean for your business. As

your total solution partner, Dell will work with you every step of the way to

make the most impactful business decisions from the results.

Dell provides virtual storage and back office offerings to enhance your

current IT environment to best meet your ever-evolving business needs.

Through the use of DPACK and the support of your account team, you

will gain quick and impactful insight to your environment that will help

you make the right decisions for your business.out of the India offices.

The company had been faced with unscheduled downtime and reduced

performance due to the aging infrastructure, as well as limited mailbox

capacity for users. Delivering a highly available platform was viewed as

critical to improving productivity and collaboration. Therefore, Sapient

wanted to migrate all users from Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 to

Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010. Manvinder Oberoi, director, enterprise

infrastructure services, Sapient Corporation, explains, “We wanted to

give our users access to the latest communication tools such as archival

features, presence, instant messaging, and video and voice conferencing.

We also realised that the amount of information flowing between our users

was increasing, and we needed the storage capacity to cost-effectively

archive this data.”

Dell PerformanceAnalysis Collection Kit

Assessment

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Get startedDPACK is intended to be a lightweight assessment that is generally concluded in 24 hours or less, start to finish. Access to DPACK is easy! You can begin the process by downloading the OS specific collectorsyou need for your environment at this link: Dell.com/downloadDPACKOnce unzipped you can just double click to begin adding remote servers. DPACK does not install, itsimply runs in memory during the collection process. We recommend running DPACK from the most modern OS in your environment, for example Windows Server 2008 R2.

Dell PerformanceAnalysis Collection Kit

Sample Output Summary

From the team at EEKCDell and CAI are pleased to present the first edition of the EEKC. This newsletter covers a wide range of topics with an aim to assist CIOs improve their organization’s efficiency. We have focused specially on the benefits on unified communication platforms that help deliver new collaboration possibilities.

We look forward to your views, reviews and opinions. Keep writing in!

Editorial

Tapan GargFounder and CEOWorld CIO Council and CIO Association of IndiaE: tapan@cioindia.org W: www.cioindia.org

Assessment