Case Studies

Because of the size and complexity of their IT infrastructure, IHG utilizes four different public clouds. They want the flexibility of multiple public clouds so they can use the platform that provides the optimal environment for each workload, as well as to protect themselves against price increases and instabilities in any one public cloud. The challenge this created was that administrators needed to understand and use four different interfaces to locate, manage, and provision compute resources. They have used VMware's vRealize Automation (vRA) for managing VMware servers, but it did not provide support for all four of the public clouds that they need. Furthermore, they found vRA to be extremely time-consuming to maintain, with upgrades requiring a multi-month processes, and a large professional services cost. Finally, for the clouds vRA could deploy to, the process of installing multi-server, multi-tier apps on any one of these public clouds was onerous and required the administrator to use multiple different interfaces (the public cloud console, Chef, and the new VM itself). Challenge Solution IHG initially selected CloudBolt as their Cloud Management Platform for their four public clouds while they still used vRA to manage VMware. In under 10 months, and multiple years left on their vRA contract, IHG decided to move all managed resources from vRA to CloudBolt due to the ease of use, extensibility, and broad technology support. CloudBolt provided IHG a single user interface and API through which they can now deploy complex apps to VMware and any of the four public clouds they use, manage these apps and their constituent servers over the course of their lifecycle, and automate their business policies and best practices surrounding server deployment and management. Their IT group has built blueprints in CloudBolt for deploying 40+ node Apache Hadoop clusters to the public cloud. After being deployed, these services can be scaled up and down from CloudBolt, and eventually decommissioned. Since CloudBolt has native Chef Enterprise integration, they are able to perform these tasks without the end user needing to separately work in the Chef UI. CloudBolt coordinates the bootstrap of the Chef agent on new VMs, associates nodes with the proper roles in Chef, and checks for success or failure of the Chef runs. Their IT group has built blueprints in CloudBolt for deploying 40+ node Apache Hadoop clusters to the public cloud. After being deployed, these services can be scaled up and down from CloudBolt, and eventually decommissioned. C A S E S T U D Y

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