Virtustream is a full-spectrum cloud provider that delivers enterprise class cloud solutions to clients worldwide. At the center of Virtustream’s offering is a secure high-performance cloud platform, xStream, offering highly available and elastic compute resources with true consumption based pricing that can be delivered as private, multi-tenant or hybrid clouds, depending on each client’s requirements. The company’s Cloud Professional Services team also provides expertise in the areas of cloud adoption, architecture strategy, migration roadmaps and integration services.

1. Smarter Computing
IBM Systems & Technology Group Computer Services
Virtustream is a full-spectrum cloud provider that delivers enterprise-
class cloud solutions to clients worldwide. At the center of Virtustream’s
offering is a secure high-performance cloud platform, xStream, offering
highly available and elastic compute resources with true consumption-
based pricing that can be delivered as private, multi-tenant or hybrid
clouds, depending on each client’s requirements. The company’s Cloud
Professional Services team also provides expertise in the areas of cloud
adoption, architecture strategy, migration roadmaps and integration
services.
Meeting varied customer requirements
By providing enterprise-class cloud services, Virtustream helps
clients eliminate the cost, complexity and risk of managing their IT
architecture themselves – while greatly improving service quality and
flexibility. When selecting a managed cloud provider, companies need
to decide what balance they need between cost, performance, security
and elasticity and whether the services offer enterprise-class security,
assurance and support.
Virtustream recognized that finding just the right balance between
these factors would be critical for their enterprise customers.
Virtustream offers a comprehensive set of cloud solutions – private,
virtual private and public. To gain the full benefit from the cloud their
clients needed a flexible platform that could be combined together to
deliver hybrid clouds. The Virtustream virtual private cloud is core to
this ability and to support these exacting requirements, Virtustream
needed a highly adaptable and scalable infrastructure that could
support a large number of virtual machines (VMs) while offering strong
performance. With over 100 clients, the company needed capabilities
that could dynamically scale to match customer requirements minute
by minute.
Virtustream builds a cloud
computing platform with
a difference
Based on smarter computing solutions from IBM
Overview
The need
Virtustream wanted to offer clients
enterprise-class cloud services and
provide greater performance than other
cloud computing providers, offering
cloud services with application SLAs,
consumption-based pricing and
compelling cloud economics.
The solution
IBM solutions are at the center
of Virtustream’s Cloud platform,
including IBM®
System x®
3650 class
servers running VMware virtualization
augmented with IBM Systems Director
and an extensive suite of IBM Tivoli®
software. Virtustream uses this powerful
combination as part of the xStream
cloud platform that supplies a range of
cloud computing services, ranging from
private on-premise cloud management
for the hyper-security conscious, to its
multi-tenanted xStream managed cloud
services.

2. Smarter Computing
IBM Systems & Technology Group Computer Services
Evaluating competing offerings
As long-time users of IBM technology, Virtustream immediately
considered IBM servers for this environment. Due to the significance
and scale of the project, the company undertook a structured
evaluation process before making a final decision, however. It carefully
benchmarked products from IBM, HP and Dell, as well as a ‘white
label’ server. It discovered early on that the alternatives were ‘faster in
a sprint’ – but that the IBM option was the clear winner when it came
to real-world performance. Dell’s server in particular was 20 percent
faster than the IBM System x3650 at running a single VM. However
Virtustream’s test showed that the Dell machine’s performance
decreased when you added more than five VMs. In fact, while the other
options could run a maximum of 16.5 VMs, Virtustream discovered
that the System x servers would stretch to as many as 35 – an increase
of 112.5 percent. For multi-tenant Cloud solutions scalability is
essential, so Virtustream selected the IBM System x3650 platform as
the basis for its system.
The xStream concept enables Virtustream to offer clients a range of
cloud architectures to meet their individual requirements. This broad
spectrum of offerings includes private clouds running on the client’s
own infrastructure in their datacenter, all the way to virtual private
clouds provided by Virtustream. Virtustream clients choose to run its
xStream software both on- or off-premise: or in any combination. The
choice of architecture must balance requirements for security, elasticity,
performance and cost, while delivering the greatest TCO savings
from secure multi-tenant clouds. The company takes potential clients
through a cloud strategy and design process to optimize the design of
their cloud solutions.
Smarter Computing: The IT Infrastructure of a Smarter Planet
Virtustream has gained an ultra-reliable, pure x86-based cloud-ready platform supporting multiple virtualized environments.
Benchmarking against competing solutions from HP and Dell showed that the IBM System x3650 could host more than twice
the average number of virtual machines compared to the other vendors – ideal for supporting the company’s multi-tenanted
xStream offering. The company delivers cloud computing services to clients through a variety of models, supported by the
highly flexible IBM System x hardware and Virtustream’s xStream management platform.
The IBM Tivoli solution is a crucial component of the Virtustream platform, providing a range of Integrated Service
Management capabilities, helping ensure compliance and adherence to service level agreements (SLAs). The company has an
in-depth view of resources at any time and can use these insights to offer clients true consumption-based pricing. Moreover,
sophisticated virtual network traffic-shaping technologies enable Virtustream to provide guaranteed I/O throughput on specific
mission-critical workloads. These capabilities combine with the Virtustream xStream platform to enable enterprise-class cloud
services.
The benefit
Virtustream’s enterprise clients benefit
from significant total cost of ownership
(TCO) savings by moving from traditional
environments to the company’s Cloud
platform, which is supported by IBM
technology, with some saving as much
as 60 percent. The flexibility of the IBM
System x platform enables Virtustream
to run as many as 30-40 virtual machines
(VMs) on each physical server, and Tivoli
software helps to control network traffic
so that I/O throughput can be guaranteed
for mission-critical workloads.

3. Smarter Computing
IBM Systems & Technology Group Computer Services
Easy infrastructure management with IBM Tivoli
Virtustream also uses a suite of IBM software within the xStream
platform to enhance functionality, including IBM Tivoli Monitoring
and IBM Change and Configuration Management Database. The
IBM Tivoli toolset includes a number of connectors to non-IBM
infrastructure components, the Tivoli software is also highly cross-
compatible, enabling Virtustream to link to clients’ environments
and deploy comprehensive monitoring. In combination the xStream
platform and the IBM toolset, Virtustream can analyze aggregate
workloads to ensure that it provisions the most appropriate resources.
It can also perform extremely granular analysis of resource usage,
enabling variable consumption-based pricing.
IBM’s equipment is enhanced with sophisticated virtual network
traffic control capabilities which make it possible for the company to
guarantee I/O throughput for specific workloads, making the solution
suitable for mission-critical applications and databases. Virtustream was
only the seventh company to be certified by SAP to run the SAP ERP
application in the cloud, a direct consequence of the provable security
and performance levels of the infrastructure. Virtustream’s largest
client – Domino Sugar, the world’s biggest sugar refiner – migrated
170 applications, including all of its SAP operations, over a 16-week
period onto the xStream platform. Virtustream claims that the resulting
environment is the largest hosted SAP solution in the world.
Enjoying the benefits
By selecting cloud-ready IBM technology to support its cloud platform,
Virtustream has gained the rock-solid reliability and performance to
ensure it consistently meets enterprise clients’ service level agreements
(SLAs). On the basis of its own tests, Virtustream discovered that
the IBM System x had the capacity to scale up to 112.5 percent
more virtual machines than the competing offerings the company
benchmarked. This showed Virtustream that the IBM platform is ideal
for running multiple VMs for multiple-tenancy cloud environments.
The IBM solution provides a number of key differentiators for
Virtustream – enabling it to offer true consumption-based pricing and
guaranteed I/O throughput for mission-critical workloads, helping
drive up client satisfaction.
A study of the company’s clients has shown significant total cost of
ownership (TCO) savings from using the xStream platform – some
up to 60 percent – in moving from traditional IT environments to
the Virtustream Cloud offering. Moreover, the IBM reputation for
performance and availability complements Virtustream’s focus on
differentiating itself from the competition by offering and meeting
enterprise-class SLAs to clients.
Solution Components
Hardware
• IBM®
System x®
3650
Software
• IBM Tivoli®
Monitoring
• IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration
Management Database
• IBM Systems Director
• SAP ERP
• VMware

4. For more information
To learn more about smarter computing from IBM and how we can
help you integrate, automate, protect and transform your IT, contact
your IBM sales representative or IBM business partner, or visit:
ibm.com/smartercomputing
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
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Produced in the United Kingdom
May 2012
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