F5 Case Studies Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability

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	Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability F5

Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability

Technology Category	Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices
Applicable Functions	Business Operation
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services Data Science Services Hardware Design & Engineering Services Software Design & Engineering Services System Integration
Challenge	A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm, heavily relies on unified communication services such as email, instant messaging, VoIP, and others. With a significant portion of its workforce operating remotely, the company needed to ensure the security and availability of these tools from any location and on any device. The firm's existing load balancing solution was not flexible enough to support an active/active data center model, limiting them to an active/passive one. This meant they couldn't load balance traffic between their two data centers, resulting in the secondary data center being primarily a disaster recovery site that sat dormant most of the time. This was seen as a waste of costly, high-end resources. Additionally, downtime was an issue as the secondary data center had to be down to migrate and bring up applications there. To serve its growing number of users worldwide, the company was considering serving applications from regional or branch locations, which would have required building additional data centers or deploying application servers in each branch office. Read More
About Customer	A.T. Kearney is a global management consulting firm that helps enterprises achieve business objectives in areas such as strategic IT, mergers and acquisitions, complexity management, manufacturing, and supply chain management. The firm has 52 offices in 36 countries and more than 3,500 users worldwide. The firm’s unified communications (UC) system is one of the most important tools employees have for communicating with each other and with clients, whether by phone, email, instant message, or audio/video conference. To deliver these services, A.T. Kearney relies on the Microsoft Office product suite, as well as SharePoint Server, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, and other solutions. When users work remotely, they can access OCS without a VPN connection, but they can’t access other critical business applications in the same way. Read More
Solution	A.T. Kearney replaced its existing Cisco routers with F5 advanced Application Delivery Controllers that intelligently manage traffic across the firm’s global network. The company deployed two BIG-IP LTM devices in each data center, which sit in front of all Microsoft application servers and provide advanced application security, acceleration, and optimization. They also deployed BIG-IP GTM to intelligently manage traffic between its two data centers. BIG-IP GTM distributes user requests based on business policy, data center and network conditions, and application performance by automatically directing requests to the best-performing data center. To assist in upgrading Microsoft OCS 2007 to the newer Microsoft Lync Server 2010 platform, A.T. Kearney used the F5 Application Ready Solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010. This solution includes application-specific templates and detailed configuration guidance that can reduce the time required to deploy Lync Server by one-third. To further support a dynamic IT infrastructure, A.T. Kearney is planning to use the F5 Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere to apply existing BIG-IP LTM traffic management policies to newly provisioned virtual machines. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

Data Science Services

Hardware Design & Engineering Services

Software Design & Engineering Services

System Integration

Challenge

A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm, heavily relies on unified communication services such as email, instant messaging, VoIP, and others. With a significant portion of its workforce operating remotely, the company needed to ensure the security and availability of these tools from any location and on any device. The firm's existing load balancing solution was not flexible enough to support an active/active data center model, limiting them to an active/passive one. This meant they couldn't load balance traffic between their two data centers, resulting in the secondary data center being primarily a disaster recovery site that sat dormant most of the time. This was seen as a waste of costly, high-end resources. Additionally, downtime was an issue as the secondary data center had to be down to migrate and bring up applications there. To serve its growing number of users worldwide, the company was considering serving applications from regional or branch locations, which would have required building additional data centers or deploying application servers in each branch office.

About Customer

A.T. Kearney is a global management consulting firm that helps enterprises achieve business objectives in areas such as strategic IT, mergers and acquisitions, complexity management, manufacturing, and supply chain management. The firm has 52 offices in 36 countries and more than 3,500 users worldwide. The firm’s unified communications (UC) system is one of the most important tools employees have for communicating with each other and with clients, whether by phone, email, instant message, or audio/video conference. To deliver these services, A.T. Kearney relies on the Microsoft Office product suite, as well as SharePoint Server, Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, and other solutions. When users work remotely, they can access OCS without a VPN connection, but they can’t access other critical business applications in the same way.

Solution

A.T. Kearney replaced its existing Cisco routers with F5 advanced Application Delivery Controllers that intelligently manage traffic across the firm’s global network. The company deployed two BIG-IP LTM devices in each data center, which sit in front of all Microsoft application servers and provide advanced application security, acceleration, and optimization. They also deployed BIG-IP GTM to intelligently manage traffic between its two data centers. BIG-IP GTM distributes user requests based on business policy, data center and network conditions, and application performance by automatically directing requests to the best-performing data center. To assist in upgrading Microsoft OCS 2007 to the newer Microsoft Lync Server 2010 platform, A.T. Kearney used the F5 Application Ready Solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010. This solution includes application-specific templates and detailed configuration guidance that can reduce the time required to deploy Lync Server by one-third. To further support a dynamic IT infrastructure, A.T. Kearney is planning to use the F5 Management Plug-In for VMware vSphere to apply existing BIG-IP LTM traffic management policies to newly provisioned virtual machines.

Impact #1	A.T. Kearney accomplished its goals to fully utilize its existing IT resources, curtail additional infrastructure costs, and improve application availability.
Impact #2	Both sites now function as fully active data centers while providing disaster recovery. If one data center were to go down entirely, BIG-IP GTM would dynamically and transparently route traffic to the other data center.
Impact #3	A.T. Kearney is now able to serve applications and data to users worldwide from both data centers, it avoided the expense of purchasing new infrastructure components for its branch offices to support a distributed computing model.

Impact #1

A.T. Kearney accomplished its goals to fully utilize its existing IT resources, curtail additional infrastructure costs, and improve application availability.

Impact #2

Both sites now function as fully active data centers while providing disaster recovery. If one data center were to go down entirely, BIG-IP GTM would dynamically and transparently route traffic to the other data center.

Impact #3

A.T. Kearney is now able to serve applications and data to users worldwide from both data centers, it avoided the expense of purchasing new infrastructure components for its branch offices to support a distributed computing model.

Benefit #1	Avoided infrastructure expenses, it’s somewhere between $1 million and $2 million per year per site.
Benefit #2	Pages that previously took a minute or more to download are now loading in less than five seconds.

Benefit #1

Avoided infrastructure expenses, it’s somewhere between $1 million and $2 million per year per site.

Benefit #2

Pages that previously took a minute or more to download are now loading in less than five seconds.

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Overview

Consulting Firm Avoids Significant Infrastructure Costs, Improves Application Availability

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit