BAA makes cost savings of more than £1.8 million with agile virtualised datacenter

Customer challenge

As part of its efforts to reduce operational expenditure, BAA is currently undergoing an IT simplification programme. The sale of Gatwick Airport highlighted the need for a more flexible IT infrastructure, BAA decided to virtualise its production datacenters to meet both its agility and cost reduction goals. With all the airport operator's key services reliant upon datacenter availability, it was crucial that BAA could minimise the risks associated with the project.

Computacenter solution

BAA partnered with Computacenter to design, plan and implement a new virtual datacenter (VDC) based on HP and VMware technologies. Computacenter assisted at every stage of the project – from evaluating BAA's existing datacenter environment and the best workloads to migrate to the virtual devices to testing and integration. The VDC includes in-built disaster recovery capabilities as well as network virtualisation to maximise uptime and flexibility.

Results

The VDC has enabled BAA to reduce its production environment by 246 servers, with spare capacity to support future growth. This has contributed to cost savings of £1.8 million. The new infrastructure will also reduce carbon emissions by 1,239 tonnes a year, minimise risk and enable greater business agility.

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Customer profile

Serving millions of air passengers every month
BAA owns and operates six UK airports: Heathrow, Stansted, Southampton, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow. The company also has retail management contracts at three US airports and a 65 per cent share in Naples airport in Italy. More than 8.5 million passengers passed through BAA's UK terminals in May 2010.

As an airport operator, the company is involved in all aspects of the airport business – from day-to-day security and retail operations to strategy and investment. BAA is also one of the largest commercial landlords in the UK, providing more than one million square feet of commercial accommodation for around 900 retail organisations.

Business challenge

Decreasing operational expenditure, increasing agility
BAA is committed to increasing efficiency and agility of IT. The company has implemented a number of initiatives to achieve this, including an IT simplification programme. The principles of the programme involve:

• Simplifying the architecture
• Managing demand
• Optimising sourcing
• Developing the IT organisation's capabilities and skills

In addition to these goals, the need to enhance IT agility was also identified by BAA when it decided to sell Gatwick Airport. Terry Fusco, Head of IT for Heathrow at BAA, explains: "The environment in which we operate is continually evolving. In order to keep up with business change, we needed an IT infrastructure that offered greater flexibility."

BAA recognised that virtualising its datacenter could help the company meet its IT and business goals, and therefore adopted a 'virtual first' policy. "In order to simplify relocation and on-going management, we wanted to decouple business services and applications from the physical infrastructure wherever possible," comments Terry. "To maximise business agility and continuity, we decided to virtualise the network as well as our server estate and incorporate disaster recovery facilities in the environment."

With BAA's datacenter underpinning the delivery of all its internal and external services – from baggage handling and security to human resources and financial management – the company needed to ensure that the ambitious virtualisation project did not impact business continuity. "To avoid disruption to our passengers and airport operations, we needed an experienced IT partner that could help minimise the risks associated with the project," adds Terry.

Computacenter solution

An optimised virtual datacenter that meets business needs
To minimise the risks and maximise the return from its virtualisation programme, BAA decided to partner with Computacenter to design, plan and implement the new environment. "Computacenter had proven experience of successfully delivering virtualisation projects, strong relationships with the key technology providers and was able to demonstrate its knowledge and expertise," comments Terry. Computacenter helped at every stage of the project, using best-practice methodologies developed in its Shared Services Factory to ensure a smooth and seamless migration to the new Virtual Datacenter (VDC) solution.

In the first instance, Computacenter assessed BAA's existing environment to validate each system's suitability for virtualisation. By combining automated discovery with a physical audit and IT team interviews, Computacenter was able to obtain a comprehensive understanding of BAA's datacenter systems, their criticality and the interdependencies between them.

VMware's Capacity Planner tool was then used to identify a candidate list of services to be virtualised as well as plan the migration of these workloads to the VDC environment, which is based on technologies from VMware and HP.
Rashmi Lakhtaria, Senior Project Manager at BAA, comments: "Computacenter built and tested the VDC at its Hatfield Integration Centre to minimise project delays and enable our team to continue with day-to-day management activities."
In accordance with the migration plan, some of the virtual server migrations had to be conducted out-of-hours to minimise the impact of planned downtime. Computacenter used Novell's PlateSpin Migrate software to accelerate the migration of the workloads and reduce the risk of error.

After installing the physical infrastructure and migrating the selected workloads, Computacenter conducted rigorous testing of the environment, including full site failover and recovery. It also integrated the VDC with BAA's existing HP OpenView tools to enable ongoing infrastructure monitoring.

Safeguarding quality of service
With critical workloads and applications, such as invoicing systems, databases and CCTV footage hosted within the new VDC, availability and performance is essential. Using VMware Site Recovery Manager, Computacenter has made disaster recovery an integral part of the VDC design. The solution provides real-time data replication between two datacenters, which means that BAA can recover automatically from a total site outage in minutes.

The robustness of the infrastructure has also been enhanced through the use of HP Virtual Connect and HP Flex-10 technologies, as Rashmi explains, "The HP tools not only simplified the initial provisioning and networking of the 30 blade devices, but will also enable us to move workloads between virtual machines and blades without the need for manual reconfiguration. This will be particularly important when responding to a hardware failure."

The HP network virtualisation solutions also simplify management and capacity planning for BAA's 10Gb network infrastructure as they enable engineers to fine-tune bandwidth according to changing business needs.

Results

Helping BAA become a more cost-effective and agile business
The VDC went live in May 2010 – on time and with no disruption to business operations. "Computacenter demonstrated exceptional technical skills and communicated risks, issues and challenges as they happened, which enabled us to resolve them quickly as a team," comments Terry. "The project has been recognised as a resounding success throughout BAA, and has a predicted return on investment of less than 24 months."

In total 276 production servers were either decommissioned or migrated over the course of the project, resulting in a significantly smaller datacenter footprint. The advantages of this optimised datacenter environment include:

Minimised risk: The VDC is designed to provide a minimum of 99.99 per cent system availability. Automated disaster recovery ensures that in the event of a hardware failure or total site outage, BAA's core systems will remain highly available, causing no disruption to airport activities.

Greater business agility: The VDC provides BAA with a virtual pool of processing power that can be quickly provisioned to respond to business events and growth in demand. BAA has been able to reduce provisioning time for a server from four to six weeks to just one day. With a 30:1 consolidation ratio, BAA has significant spare capacity on its 30 servers to support future workloads.

Reduced environmental impact: By decreasing the size of its server estate, BAA will be able to significantly reduce power and cooling requirements. It is estimated that this will cut its carbon emissions by 1,239 tonnes per annum.

Financial savings: By implementing a VDC, BAA has eliminated the need to create a new datacenter facility, and reduced costs by a total of £1.8 million through:
• £800,000 saving through server decommissioning, deployment and forward capacity provision
• £300,000 saving through reduced datacenter space requirements
• £450,000 saving through lower power and cooling requirements
• £200,000 saving in network switch costs
• £75,000 saving on Microsoft licences

BAA has calculated that within just three years the project will enable it to achieve a return on investment of more than £2.5 million.

"By virtualising our production systems we have been able to make a significant contribution to the company's strategic goals for IT simplification and cost reduction while achieving greater business agility and IT performance, which is critical to the running of BAA's airports," comments Terry.