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When telecom providers around the world need to enhance the services they provide their customers, they turn to Tellabs. For the past 30 years, Tellabs, Inc. has developed and marketed innovative solutions for high-quality voice, video and data services over wireline and wireless networks.
With revenues of $2 billion in 2006, Tellabs maintains offices around the world, with headquarters in Naperville, Ill. Its 3,700 employees provide a full range of support to customers, from sales and service to research and development.
Addressing server proliferation
Tellabs relies on Dell PowerEdge™ servers to run its critical software, including its SAP environment, Citrix® applications for secure access and customer applications it hosts and serves over secure portals.
A couple of years ago, Tellabs realized it had a problem not uncommon to quickly growing enterprises. “We had servers all over the place,” says Jean Holley, executive VP and CIO at Tellabs. “They had proliferated to the point where they were difficult to manage, and the cost of ownership was becoming unacceptable.”
Like many companies, whenever Tellabs needed to deploy a new application or add capacity to its data center, it would determine the sizing requirements, then order, install and configure the new equipment. The entire process took weeks, if not months, to complete.
Transforming the infrastructure
Tellabs realized that to stay competitive and roll out new products and services quickly, it needed to transform its IT infrastructure. After testing EMC's VMware ESX Server with its development and test systems, Tellabs realized that it could drastically reduce the number of servers in its production environment.
“In the past, we had been loading many of our servers with just one application, and their utilization rates were commonly just 25 percent or less,” says Holley. “We knew virtualization technology had evolved to where it could really help us consolidate. The Dell and VMware solution delivered not only excellent performance, but was also easy to configure and manage.”
The highly efficient server farm
Tellabs launched an aggressive initiative to consolidate and virtualize its production infrastructure onto rack-mounted Dell PowerEdge “server farms” running VMware Virtual Server at its main datacenter in Naperville. In doing so, Tellabs consolidated applications running in geographically dispersed locations, enabling more centralized control of its IT operations.
Using virtualization, an enterprise can run multiple, independent operating environments, known as “virtual machines,” on a single hardware platform. Typically, a physical server might host five or six—perhaps 10—virtual machines. Tellabs decided to push the envelope farther, and has hosted as many as 40 virtual machines on a single server.
“We put a lot of thought into optimizing VMware-- the Dell servers support a lot of virtual machines on each physical server, and the results were worth it,” says Holley. “By using Dell’s PowerEdge servers with multi-core processors and loading them with memory, we were able to achieve very high utilization rates. Beyond that, virtualization enables us to provision new applications for business units very quickly, making IT a strategic enabler of the business.”
Tellabs’ first server farm was made up of eight Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers hosting virtualized Exchange, SAP and custom applications. Tellabs has recently gone online with its second virtualized server farm using 10 Dell PowerEdge 6850 dual-core quad-socket servers. The company is planning to deploy a third one with Dell PowerEdge 6950 servers using the upgraded AMD chipset.
In each farm, which runs as an independent environment, two of the servers operate in standby mode, ready for VMware’s VMotion to move virtual sessions onto them whenever another server requires maintenance or updating. “VMotion is an absolute gem—it gives us the flexibility to flip capacity to another set of servers instantly, with absolutely zero user impact,” says Holley. “It delivers high availability and a new level of disaster recovery capability to our infrastructure.”
The real benefits of virtualization
So far, Tellabs’ use of virtualization has eliminated more than 100 physical servers, slashing $150,000 a year in power and cooling costs along with $250,000 in hardware maintenance. Holley estimates that Tellabs has also avoided having to buy 250 additional servers at a cost of $2 million, thanks to its virtualized server farms.
“Moreover, virtualization has enabled us to consolidate onto SAN storage, which also makes the overall environment less expensive to maintain and much easier to manage,” says Holley.
With its server farms in place, Tellabs is already a reference site for best practices in virtualization. A steady stream of IT executives from the area tours Tellabs’ data center to learn how to take full advantage of virtualization’s capabilities. “The icing on the cake is how impressed visitors are when they learn that we can launch new applications in hours instead of weeks,” says Holley.
Tellabs credits Dell’s support and expertise for helping ensure its successful move to virtualization. “The Dell account team has a deep understanding of our environment and has the expertise to meet our evolving needs,” says Holley. “We prefer to work with a single vendor, and by partnering with Dell, we don’t have to deal with multiple solutions.”
“Virtualization is a powerful technology that we’ve applied in the real world to improve asset utilization and uptime, cut the total cost of ownership, and enable fast deployment of new services,” says Holley. “Dell has delivered a phenomenal solution.”
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