Case Studies

Before CloudBolt, the enterprise relied on a complicated integration of vCloud Orchestrator, Chef, and a ticketing system to run their server provisioning processes. They struggled with slow turn- around time, a lack of governance, and difficulty understanding their costs. Challenge Solution With CloudBolt, the enterprise enabled: Dramatically faster VM provisioning and customer onboarding times Chargeback/shameback with cost tracking and transparency across lines of business Policies and quotas for controlling usage and access to resources Deployments that conformed to company security and operations policies Real-time software license management and tracking Self-testing of the operations environment Improved margin reporting and pricing Interactive reports of infrastructure usage allowed enterprise IT to provide accurate actionable information to line-of-business owners about resource costs. This information was used to set pricing and report on margins. IT was also able to differentiate high-value clients from ones that required more resources than they were paying for. Customer satisfaction through better availability Because the enterprise utilized CloudBolt's multi-tenant capabilities to expose provisioning capabilities to their hosted customers, it was critical that every step of the process worked perfectly. They used CloudBolt's Continuous Infrastructure Testing (CIT) to perform end- to-end testing of the entire provisioning process. If a hypervisor or orchestration tool fails, CIT warns system administrators, giving them time to proactively address the issue before end-users notice. Faster turn-around with smart automation and integrations CloudBolt's orchestration hooks feature enabled the company to tightly integrate with existing workflow components. For example, InfoBlox was configured within CloudBolt for IP address management during provisioning and modification of networks. Orchestration hooks also enabled CloudBolt to create ServiceNow tickets when provisioning requests were approved and to update those tickets as servers were modified or deleted. CloudBolt allowed existing infrastructure to be partitioned into "environments" using characteristics such as hypervisors, networks, applications, OS templates, and more. These environments were exposed to end-users via simple order forms and a unified API that let them request systems and application stacks without regard to where those resources would be deployed. The time required to provision a single VM was reduced from one business day to just 15 minutes. The time to onboard new hosted clients was reduced from seven days to under 30 minutes. Building a hybrid cloud with CloudBolt didn't mean starting over In addition to discovering the enterprise's pre-existing servers, CloudBolt also connected to their Chef installation and automatically imported the available Chef recipes, cookbooks, and roles. Chef content was then ready to re-use from within CloudBolt as applications that could be added to and removed from servers. CloudBolt did the same for their vCloud Orchestrator environment, exposing the flows so that they could be executed automatically or manually at any point during the server lifecycle. C A S E S T U D Y

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