Windows Server 2008 R2Customer Solution Case Study

Bank Virtualizes Servers, Reduces Downtime by 70 Percent, Saves $148,000 in Hardware

OverviewCountry or Region: LebanonIndustry: Financial services

Customer ProfileHeadquartered in Beirut, First National Bank (FNB) is a full-service banking institution with a nationwide network of 21 branches throughout Lebanon. It employs approximately 500 people.

Business SituationFNB wanted to reduce its physical infrastructure to save on power, hardware, and IT maintenance costs and to equip IT with better tools to reduce unplanned downtime at the branches.

SolutionFNB chose the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V to virtualize its data center and branch environment and Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage its infrastructure.

Benefits Saved $148,000 through server

consolidation Empowered IT to support the business Reduced unplanned downtime by 70

percent Built a foundation for IT efficiencies

“We were impressed at how quickly Microsoft enhanced Hyper-V to the point where it competes with VMware. We chose Hyper-V because it’s a cost-effective, enterprise-ready virtualization solution.”

Marwan Khawand, Head of Information Systems, First National Bank

First National Bank (FNB) is a leading commercial bank in Lebanon. Its servers required a disproportionate amount of maintenance and consumed too much power. IT staff worked hard to fix unplanned outages and improve customer service. FNB decided to deploy the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V virtualization technology at the data center and bank branches. It reduced the number of servers in its data center by 20 percent, saved US$148,000 in hardware costs, and increased the reliability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. By using Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage both physical and virtual environments, IT staffers reduced unplanned downtime at the branches by 70 percent.

SituationFirst National Bank (FNB) provides commercial, retail, finance, and investment banking products and services for individuals and institutions in Lebanon and the Middle East. The bank’s headquarters is located in the heart of Beirut’s financial district, and a network of 21 branches serves the needs of communities across the country. With a goal to deliver quality financial products and services, FNB has a highly qualified, motivated workforce supported by advanced banking and business productivity technologies.

It is the mandate of the IT department to ensure that the technology infrastructure at FNB supports efficient operations and the development of innovative banking products delivered with superior customer service. For its annual IT budget, FNB strives to minimize the impact of industry and financial market changes through sound IT investments: licensing cost-effective software that helps provide data security, reduce management complexity, support operational efficiency, and align IT with business goals.

Until recently, FNB had 48 servers running the Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 (SP4) and Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise operating systems in its data center in Beirut, and 21 servers running the Windows 2000 Server SP4 operating system, one at each of its branch offices. Each server at the branches hosted the Misys Equation Branch Automation (EBA) 2.2 banking application, a mission-critical application upon which the branch’s operations rested.

“We ran into problems because the same server also ran Active Directory Domain Services,” says Marwan Khawand, Head of Information Systems at First National Bank. “If an incident occurred, we faced a recovery process that included a full reinstallation of the server application and Active Directory Domain Services. We wanted faster recovery times so that we could avoid disrupting service at the branch.”

A new issue arose when FNB decided to upgrade the EBA application to the 2.3 version. “In order for the new version to run properly, we needed to separate the EBA application and Active Directory Domain Services, which would have required the purchase of 21 new servers,” says Khawand.

In the first quarter of 2010, FNB began an overall infrastructure upgrade, including its network, hardware, and the Windows operating system for both server and desktop environments. As part of this project, IT staff began thinking about ways to optimize its server infrastructure and streamline IT management. “We needed to replace our old servers, consolidate hardware, and reduce power consumption at the data center and the branches,” says Ghanem Ayoub, Head of Technical Support at First National Bank. “At the data center, we were running into problems creating test environments due to hardware and space requirements and implementation time and costs. We wanted to streamline our testing environment to deliver new IT services to the business more quickly.”

SolutionTo accomplish these goals, First National Bank upgraded to the Windows Server

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"We needed to replace our old servers, consolidate hardware, and reduce power consumption at the data center and the branches."

Ghanem Ayoub, Head of Technical Support, First National Bank

2008 R2 Enterprise and Standard operating systems with Service Pack 1 (SP1) for servers at the data center and to Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with SP1 for the branches. With Hyper-V virtualization technology built into Windows Server 2008, FNB could develop its virtualization strategy at no extra cost. It focused first on the branch offices, then on the data center. On the desktop, FNB is upgrading from the Windows XP operating system to the Windows 7 Professional operating system, beginning with newly acquired PCs for branches and head office.

“We trust in Microsoft products; they offer cost-effective technologies that interoperate with our existing environment,” says Khawand. “We were impressed at how quickly Microsoft enhanced Hyper-V to the point where it easily competes with VMware. We chose Hyper-V because it’s a cost-effective, enterprise-ready virtualization solution.”

Branch Offices Virtualized At each of the 21 FNB branch locations, a single server running Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V acts as a host for two virtual machines: one for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, which allows a server to dynamically distribute IP addressing and configuration information to clients on the network, and one to isolate its Misys EBA solution. Isolating this application significantly reduced the number of unscheduled outages at the branches. As part of its upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, FNB plans to activate the BranchCache feature to enable content from the bank’s file and web servers on a wide area network to be cached on computers at local branch

offices. The bank also plans to take advantage of DirectAccess, a remote-access virtual private network technology that is part of Windows Server 2008 R2 and is optimized for PCs running Windows 7.

“The deployment to the branches was accomplished in one month,” says Khawand. “This was a fresh installation of a completely new environment—hardware and software—that replaced the old Windows 2000 servers. Microsoft provided on-site assistance, project guidance, and follow-up.”

Key Business Workloads VirtualizedFNB uses Hyper-V in the data center to virtualize several key business solutions and boost efficiencies in the test environment. To introduce virtualization into the data center, FNB deployed nine servers running Hyper-V: these include two for the test environment that host around 12 virtual machines, four for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 messaging and collaboration software, and three for key business applications.

“We migrated our Exchange Server 2003 solution running on a single instance of Windows Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010 running on four physical servers hosting eight virtual machines, two in each host,” says Ayoub. “We virtualized all the Exchange Server roles. During the design phase, we used the Microsoft Exchange Calculator to accurately allocate our hardware resources for each role. The disks were configured as pass-through for Exchange mailbox servers. Hard disks are being configured for CAS [content addressed storage] hub servers.”

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“We trust in Microsoft products; they offer cost-effective technologies that interoperate with our existing environment."

Marwan Khawand, Head of Information Systems, First National Bank

The three Hyper-V hosts that are dedicated to key business applications have eight virtual machines. The applications include Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, a Maximo help-desk solution from IBM, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software. FNB also virtualized Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, the server-based report-generation software system that is part of Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

New Hyper-V FeaturesFNB took advantage of many new features within Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, such as Network Load Balancing (NLB), an optional feature in Windows Server 2008 that load-balances network traffic (sent to a cluster virtual IP address) among multiple servers in an NLB cluster. “We are using Network Load Balancing to load-balance network traffic for our Exchange Server 2010 client access server arrays for high-availability purposes,” says Khawand. “Also, we are using Dynamic Memory to optimize the memory resources of our Hyper-V hosts. Dynamic Memory balances how memory is distributed between our virtual machines in response to changing workloads.”

IT staffers who are responsible for server administration use the snapshot feature in Hyper-V, which provides a useful method of creating and applying point-in-time views of the statuses of virtual machines from the Hyper-V Manager, a Microsoft Management Console snap-in. “Snapshots are being used to save the state of our virtual machines before we modify the applications or operating systems,” says Khawand.

Interoperable Data Center ProductsTo complement the upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 and its Hyper-V virtualization initiative, FNB is deploying Microsoft System Center data center products. These products work together to simplify and automate IT administration tasks, and they form an essential component of the newly virtualized environments at FNB. IT staff used System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 to perform physical-to-virtual migrations of its servers at the branches and the data center. Also, IT staff took advantage of the interoperability between Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 by installing Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) management packs on each physical host and virtual machine to collect data about the virtual environment and hardware performance. By using PRO management packs, IT staff can monitor and optimize the performance of hosts and virtual machines based on central processing unit and memory thresholds.

“System Center data center products are an integral part of our Hyper-V virtualization strategies,” says Khawand. “We are using these products to properly maintain and manage our entire virtual environment. All our hosts are managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. We use System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 for operating system deployments, asset inventories, and remote assistance. We use Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 to back up our Exchange Server database and to enable single mailbox restore.”

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BenefitsSince deploying Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, First National Bank has reduced operating costs, minimized service disruptions at the branches, and improved IT productivity to better support the business.

Decreased Costs Through Server ConsolidationWith its virtualization solution from Microsoft, FNB can simplify server management and reduce costs while enhancing the flexibility, reliability, and scalability of its physical server infrastructure and the key business applications that it hosts. Server consolidation is a direct benefit of virtualization—FNB consolidated its servers from 48 to 31 at the data center, a reduction of 20 percent. “We have seen big savings in power consumption, IT administration costs, space, and hardware costs,” says Khawand. “We saved [US]$74,500 on hardware costs at the data center and $73,500 at the branches, for a total of $148,000 in hardware savings.”

Empowered IT to Support the BusinessUsing the interoperable suite of System Center data center products to streamline both physical and virtual infrastructure management is another significant benefit for FNB. In the test and development center, IT staff can quickly set up and tear down test environments to respond rapidly to business requirements for new services and applications. This has empowered the IT department to help make FNB a more agile organization.

“Deploying new servers by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 is more convenient than physical server preparation, especially the time saved for hardware acquisition,” says Ayoub. “Now we can create virtual machines within 15 minutes instead of the 90 minutes required to install the Windows operating system with updates and service packs. Now our test and development environment can respond quickly to business requests, virtualizing any physical live environment and making necessary changes to create identical test environments. The business is benefitting from the fact that we can quickly test application upgrades to ensure that they’ll work in our production environment.”

Reduced Unplanned Downtime by 70 PercentFor FNB, enabling faster server recovery is one of the main benefits of virtualizing the branch office environment. “Using Hyper-V to virtualize our banking application at the branches means we can take advantage of business continuity features, such as the virtual machine snapshot feature, to ensure we can quickly revert back to a previous state,” says Khawand. “The Hyper-V solution helped FNB to better improve the quality of banking services provided at the branches.”

The virtualized Exchange Server environment improves reliability of the company’s email service because the cluster configuration eliminates one point of failure. And because FNB IT staffers use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 and System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to proactively monitor and manage the virtualized infrastructure at the

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“We saved [US]$74,500 on hardware costs at the data center and $73,500 at the branches.”

Marwan Khawand, Head of Information Systems, First National Bank

branches, FNB has reduced unscheduled downtime by 70 percent.

Built a Foundation for IT EfficienciesThis initial foray into virtualization, resulting in a more cost-effective dynamic infrastructure, is only the beginning for FNB. The bank plans to expand its virtualized environment to ensure that the IT infrastructure can support continued growth at minimal cost. “Microsoft technologies are the foundation of our virtualization strategies going forward,” says Khawand. “Our plan is to virtualize the complete data center, building high-availability clusters and introducing load balancing. We are also going to create a redundant, remote disaster recovery site, and we are planning a Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for our 400 desktops. All these initiatives mean we’ll be seeing a continuous improvement in our infrastructure and services, so we can better support the business.”

Windows Server 2008 R2Windows Server 2008 R2 is a multipurpose operating system designed to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server and private cloud infrastructure, helping you to

save time and reduce costs. It provides you with powerful tools to react to business needs faster than ever before with greater control and confidence.

For more information, visit:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about First National Bank products and services, call (961) (1) 963000 or visit the website at: www.fnb.com.lb

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1− Microsoft Exchange Server 2010− Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010− Microsoft System Center

Configuration Manager 2007 R2− Microsoft System Center Data

Protection Manager 2007− Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager 2007

− Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2

Technologies− Active Directory Domain Services− Hyper-V

Hardware HP ProLiant DL360 G7 servers IBM Lenovo ThinkCentre A85 PCs HP Elite 7100 PCs