Partner Solution Case Study

Hosting Provider Quickly Offers Cost-Effective Cloud Services to Small Businesses

OverviewCountry or Region: ItalyIndustry: Hosting

Partner ProfileVaiSulWeb offers web hosting, domain registration, and other Internet services across Europe and, soon, Asia. VaiSulWeb is based in Rende, Italy.

Business SituationVaiSulWeb exclusively uses Microsoft technologies in its data centers and sought additional opportunities to offer new cloud services while continuously trimming operational costs.

SolutionVaiSulWeb upgraded to Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 and implemented Windows Azure Services for Windows Server to offer end-customer experiences similar to those in Windows Azure from its own data centers.

Benefits Gain competitive differentiation and

growth opportunities Deliver sophisticated services at

affordable prices Reduce costs by 50 percent

“With Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, we can now provide services similar to those in Windows Azure.… [These] services will generate tremendous growth for us.”

Guglielmo Mengora, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Netcore

VaiSulWeb is a fast-growing European hosting service provider that serves mostly small-business customers from a modern private-cloud infrastructure built on the Windows Server 2012 operating system and managed by Microsoft System Center 2012. VaiSulWeb looked to drive competitive advantage and grow markets by upgrading to System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 and implementing Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. With these technologies, VaiSulWeb was able to rapidly deploy a multitenant management portal with which it can offer self-service websites and virtual machines at low cost and high scale. The customer’s experience is similar to what they would enjoy with Windows Azure, the Microsoft public cloud service, but delivered from VaiSulWeb’s own data centers. VaiSulWeb also lowered data center costs by 50 percent by slashing hardware needs and centralizing data center management.

SituationFounded in 2003, VaiSulWeb, which means “go to the web” in Italian, offers web hosting, domain registration, and other Internet services primarily in Italy but also in other European countries. It is also expanding into Asia. VaiSulWeb is a subsidiary, and the commercial brand, of Netcore, an Italian company that provides data management and development services.

VaiSulWeb exclusively uses Microsoft technologies because of the competitive advantage of using an integrated offering from data center to cloud. It wanted to expand its Microsoft software and services to include services consistent with Windows Azure, the Microsoft public cloud service development, hosting, and management environment. “Microsoft technology is a key competitive advantage for us and a way to generate growth opportunities and expand outside of Italy,” says Guglielmo Mengora, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Netcore. “We were very eager to work with Microsoft to expand our portfolio of Microsoft services.”

Specifically, VaiSulWeb wanted to use Microsoft technologies to simplify and expand cloud computing opportunities for small businesses, which constitute 90 percent of all businesses in Italy and most of its customers. VaiSulWeb had used the Windows Server 2012 operating system and Microsoft System Center 2012 to create a private cloud—a configuration of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources that can be dynamically reconfigured on demand to meet customer needs. By configuring its data centers as a single private cloud, VaiSulWeb was able to move away from dedicated physical or virtual servers for specific applications and customers to

enable higher utilization of assets and reduce costs.

VaiSulWeb already used System Center to manage hundreds of virtual machines from a single console and automate many management process steps. But it wanted to continue to reduce operational costs by creating even more automated efficiencies. Its ultimate goal was to let customers manage and scale their own infrastructures using a self-service portal.

VaiSulWeb also sought even greater flexibility and cost effectiveness in offering virtual machine and storage scalability, failover clustering, disaster recovery, and other enterprise-grade services. “Our customers had trouble scaling granularly or on demand,” says Mengora. “They either had to overprovision servers, which was expensive, or just not scale. Clusters were too complicated and expensive for most of our customers; they might switch from a physical server to multiple virtual machines, but they would stop there.”

SolutionWith the release of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft helped advance VaiSulWeb’s existing private cloud by introducing many scalability, availability, and enterprise-grade enhancements. These include disaster recovery, virtualized networking, and Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012.

Public-Cloud Services from a Windows Server InfrastructureMicrosoft also introduced a new technology called Windows Azure Services for Windows Server, which enables hosting providers to deploy a self-service portal, website, and virtual machine services similar to those in Windows Azure from their own data centers. VaiSulWeb immediately saw huge possibilities for its

“Microsoft technology is a key competitive advantage for us and a way to generate growth opportunities and expand outside of Italy.”

Guglielmo Mengora, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Netcore

business by using this technology, which gave it a way to quickly and cost-effectively provide scalable, high-density websites; virtual machine hosting; and a self-service management portal. VaiSulWeb could build and customize multitenant, high-density services, taking advantage of Microsoft’s investments and experience running similar services in the Windows Azure public cloud, and customers already familiar with Windows Azure would benefit from the consistency of a familiar administrative interface.

By building offerings on Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1, VaiSulWeb can finally deliver the advantages of an enterprise-caliber clustered server environment to small business customers. “The ability to deploy services similar to Windows Azure in our data centers is a great example of the many technologies Microsoft has designed specifically for service providers in its latest wave of products,” says Antonio Cunto, Microsoft Virtualization and Automation

Expert at VaiSulWeb. “These services give us a new capability that we didn’t have before—the ability for customers to automatically and very easily scale websites and virtual machines from a single server to multiple shared server instances without complexity.”

Hosting service provider end customers have self-service access to services through the portal, which communicates with the API layer and ultimately calls the underlying services. The portal provides the same easy-to-use experience that customers enjoy in Windows Azure but can be customized to reflect the branding and other interests of the hosting provider. The API layer is open to accommodate integration with custom portals as well as future Microsoft and third-party modules, increasing the number of services that can quickly be monetized by hosting providers.

One key feature of these new services that was particularly compelling to VaiSulWeb was the self-service nature of the end-customer experience. For example, if a customer is using the Web Sites module to host its web properties and realizes that traffic is starting to overload its available resources, the customer can simply click the “Scale” tab in the portal and opt to increase the number of instances of their web service. This also instantly provides incremental revenue to VaiSulWeb. Similarly, the customer can also easily click a button to move from a shared infrastructure environment to one where they have dedicated capacity. While this switch may bring in significantly more revenue for VaiSulWeb, this process can take multiple days for most service providers today. However, the Web Sites module can reduce this time down to under a minute by automating the work.

Windows Azure Services for Windows Server is made up of four components: a Service Management Portal, a Service Management API, and two services—Web Sites and Virtual Machines, deployed on top of the hosting provider’s Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 infrastructure.

Software-Based Networking, StorageVaiSulWeb is also using Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 to offer flexibility to customers and ease on-boarding of customer workloads. By using Hyper-V Network Virtualization and Hyper-V Extensible Switch in Windows Server 2012, together with the Virtual Machine Manager component in System Center 2012, VaiSulWeb can implement multitenant virtual network environments “out of the box.” By enabling network virtualization, VaiSulWeb has the ability to directly import customer workloads without the need to reconfigure IP addresses for compatibility with VaiSulWeb’s own network.

“We are eager to use Microsoft cloud operating system technologies to offer a wide range of services, including virtual networks,” says Luca Fata, Microsoft Systems Engineer and Infrastructure Engineer at VaiSulWeb. “Virtual networks will enable us to give customers more powerful networking options at lower prices and help us differentiate ourselves from other hosting providers.”

VaiSulWeb also got rid of extra-expensive storage area networks (SANs), replacing them with storage servers based on Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces. Storage Spaces enables companies to use industry-standard storage—notably “just a bunch of disks” (JBOD) devices—to build highly scalable, continuously available storage solutions. “Since we rent our data center space and those data centers are very far from us, using complicated setups like hardware SANs and fiber-channel uplinks is very expensive, hard to manage, and slows service delivery,” Mengora says. “We prefer to build software-based infrastructure using commodity hardware, which can replaced if needed and which can provide data center independence

because it can be replicated in different data centers operated by different companies. That way, we can standardize our deployments and reduce management costs.”

Single Management Console for Multiple Data CentersBy using a software-based infrastructure, VaiSulWeb can use System Center 2012 SP1 to manage its infrastructure across multiple data centers in a unified way. “We can now manage and monitor all of our clouds and hosts by using the System Center 2012 console, even if we’re operating three different domains,” Fata says. VaiSulWeb is just starting to use the Orchestrator component of System Center 2012 to create runbooks that will automate operations across data centers.

BenefitsBy upgrading to System Center 2012 SP1 and deploying Windows Azure Services for Windows Server in its data center, VaiSulWeb has gained a distinct competitive advantage and growth opportunities, can offer new services at scale, and has reduced costs by 50 percent.

Gain Competitive Differentiation and New Growth OpportunitiesBy deploying Windows Azure-like services in its data center, VaiSulWeb stands to gain a significant competitive advantage in its market. Small hosted services providers want to resell Windows Azure services, and VaiSulWeb is packaging these services for their use, as well as creating its own services to offer through the Service Management Portal.

“With Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012, we can now provide services similar to those in Windows Azure,” says Mengora. “This is something that no one else in our market is yet delivering, and

“We can now manage and monitor all of our clouds and hosts by using the System Center 2012 console, even if we’re operating three different domains.”

Luca Fata, Microsoft Systems Engineer and Infrastructure Engineer, VaiSulWeb

these services will generate tremendous growth for us. More than 50 percent of our resellers joined our trial of Windows Azure Services for Windows Server, and nearly 30 percent of our customers are installing open-source applications using our control panel. Many of them are choosing us because they can successfully run popular applications like Joomla or DotNetNuke, and we expect many of such customers to switch to Windows Azure Services. With this new technology, we can give small businesses true enterprise-grade hosting capabilities with point-and-click simplicity.”

Deliver Sophisticated Services at Affordable PricesIn addition to opening up a wealth of new services and growth opportunities, the ability to deliver Windows Azure-like services from its data center helps VaiSulWeb open up tremendous possibilities for its small business customers. “Our new services can give small businesses all the benefits of their own cloud without the complexity of having to manage it themselves,” says Cunto. “They can scale up their websites and services with point-and-click simplicity and gain sophisticated capabilities such as failover clustering without the associated costs. They don’t have to worry about whether their workloads are running on physical or virtual servers. They just want to ‘click and scale,’ and that’s what they can do with us now.”

Reduce Costs by 50 PercentVaiSulWeb can expand its services and customer loads without expanding its physical infrastructure or management staff. In fact, VaiSulWeb has actually reduced its data center costs by 50 percent by building on Microsoft cloud technologies. A big chunk of the savings come from hardware efficiencies. First, the company has reduced server costs by

almost half by virtualizing densely with Hyper-V and expects to lower its hardware-in-service rate from more than the current three years to less than two years. VaiSulWeb estimates that it is running nearly 50 percent more virtual machines on half the hardware. “We now have many more services than we did seven months ago, and our costs are lower than they were then,” Mengora says.

Second, by using Windows Server 2012 as the base operating system for new virtual machines and using dynamic memory, VaiSulWeb was able to reduce total memory needed by about 20 percent for the same workloads. Third, VaiSulWeb has replaced expensive SANs with Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces. “With a hardware-agnostic infrastructure, we can move customer workloads across virtual machines, storage resources, and networks without the hassle of managing specific hardware and network devices,” Mengora says. “When a storage or network device in our private cloud fails, we can simply switch nodes around and provide faster hardware replacement because we can move customer workloads to another storage device or computer without interruption.”

A big chunk of savings comes from reduced data center management time. “We can use our private cloud to manage all our services through the System Center console, which means we can manage more hardware and more workloads with the same number of staff members,” Mengora says. “Life is much easier now even though we’re working in multiple locations.”

VaiSulWeb has plenty of growing room in its private cloud infrastructure, especially when augmented with Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. “We can pack

thousands of virtual machines into a relatively small physical-server footprint and then use Windows Azure Services for Windows Server to provide the same expandability for customer data,” Fata says. “This allows us to save money while also providing better services for our customers. There’s nothing else like this in Italy right now.”

Windows Server 2012Windows Server drives many of the world’s largest data centers, empowers small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Building on this legacy, Windows Server 2012 redefines the category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements that span virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. Simply put, Windows Server 2012 helps you transform your IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.

For more information, visit:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/2012-default.aspx

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 VaiSulWeb products and services, visit the website at: www.vaisulweb.com

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

Document published March 2013

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2012 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center 2012

Service Pack 1

Technologies− Hyper-V− Windows Azure Services for Windows

Server

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

Document published March 2013

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2012− Microsoft System Center 2012 SP 1

Microsoft Services− Microsoft Services Consulting

Technologies− Hyper-V− Windows Azure Services for Windows

Server

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