1. Although enterprises strive to deliver software at high velocity and scale, they are often impeded by the complexity of deploying, upgrading, and operating their applications. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (CF) improves enterprise agility by reducing the complexity and cost of managing disparate systems and configurations. Since its introduction in 2013, CF has been a key enabler for modern, software-driven enterprises to rapidly set up and manage a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment on their choice of infrastructure—including a private data center.
CHALLENGE
To support Fortune 100 customers relying on CF, Pivotal
employs approximately 130 developers worldwide. The development teams based in San Francisco are responsible for creating and testing new features and upgrades before they are deployed to a service provider and accessed by customers. When Bay Area development teams began to experience a nearly 40 percent failure rate across testing environments due to unreliable hardware performance, productivity decreased while frustration increased.
CF teams deploy code more than fifty times on a typical day. Because it takes between 45 minutes and six hours to conduct simple and more complex tests, every restart was costing valuable time. Moreover, if developers were unable to successfully complete tests, they attempted to troubleshoot the provisioned infrastructure before examining their code for defects.
“Our teams were not nearly as productive as they could have been because they were spending too much time chasing down failures that had nothing to do with their code,” remembers David Stevenson, CF Director of Engineering. “Tests were frequently unsuccessful because the boxes we built internally to test the code were unreliable, not because the code was bad. Yet developers could never be sure whether hardware or software caused the issue.”
AT-A-GLANCE
Challenges
•
Developers were experiencing a 40 percent hardware failure rate during testing cycles
•
Test restarts consumed 45 minutes to six hours of developers’ time
•
Developers wasted valuable time and resources troubleshooting unreliable systems
Results
•
Increased developer productivity
•
Increased machine performance
•
Greater development confidence, less frustration
•
100 percent uptime
CASE STUDY
Vblock Improves Reliability, Saves Time
for Pivotal Cloud Foundry Team
DEVELOPERS DELIVERING FEATURE SET FOR LEADING PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE SOLUTION EXPERIENCE 100 PERCENT UPTIME WITH VBLOCK
OVERVIEW
“ We are thrilled with Vblock. It has delivered 100 percent uptime.”
— David Stevenson, Director of Engineering, Pivotal CF
pivotal.io

2. Pivotal, Pivotal CF, and Cloud Foundry are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Pivotal Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other Countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.
© Copyright 2014 Pivotal Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. PVTL-CS-379-11/14
Pivotal offers a modern approach to technology that organizations need to thrive in a new era of business innovation. Our solutions intersect cloud, big data and agile
development, creating a framework that increases data leverage, accelerates application delivery, and decreases costs, while providing enterprises the speed and scale
they need to compete.
CASE STUDY
Pivotal 3495 Deer Creek Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 pivotal.io
Pivotal’s internal solution had been architected in such a
way—featuring six blade servers with Intel Dual-Xeon eight-core,
128 GB RAM with Synology RackStation RS812 storage in
RAID configurations with six terabytes usable—that it should
have effectively supported Pivotal’s CF Elastic Runtime speed
and capacity requirements. Yet the solution’s continual failure
prompted the team to attempt to remedy the situation and
increase reliability by purchasing more hardware, several RAID
cards, and at least a dozen solid-state drives (SSDs) for storage.
Again, the solution didn’t solve the problem—the environments
were still unreliable. The Pivotal team unsuccessfully attempted
to improve the configurations in two more iterations, but the
improvements were marginal. There were still too many failed
tests caused by problematic infrastructure which was a significant
challenge for the CF engineering team that relies on a test-driven
development methodology that typically equates failed tests with
bad code, not unreliable hardware.
“We are a technology-driven organization, so everyone
was frustrated but no one in particular was responsible for
the hardware, so team members began to avoid the very
flaky environments and gravitate toward the slightly less flaky
ones,” says Stevenson.
SOLUTION
When the Vblock system from VCE arrived, developers hoped
it would solve the reliability issues because the Vblock system
seamlessly integrates best-in-class compute, network, and storage
technologies from industry leaders Cisco, EMC, and VMware. In
contrast to Pivotal’s custom-built boxes and the online services
it acquires from Hetzner, the Vblock system is built on a single,
highly secure, and standardized infrastructure. It would provide
dynamic pools of resources that could be intelligently provisioned
and managed to address CF developers’ timely testing and
deployment needs.
“Vblock totally exceeded our expectations,” explains Stevenson.
“I can’t think of a single time a deploy has failed since it arrived.
We ran nine simultaneous deploys of CF on Vblock and it still
didn’t break.”
Pre-integrated, tested, and validated, the Vblock system that
Pivotal quickly deployed increased the predictability and
timeliness of CF development projects. Within a week of installing
Vblock, the CF team was running product tests without failure.
Stevenson says, “Because Vblock is built to never go down,
our ramp has been fast.” Pivotal began by adding one or two
environments a day over the first couple of weeks. Today, Vblock
supports 28 CF environments.
RESULTS
Instead of flaky hardware, CF developers now rely on the turnkey
Vblock system for fast and reliable provisioning, which helps
Pivotal achieve the following business benefits:
• Increased developer productivity – Developers are saving
time because they no longer have to rerun tests that average
between 45 minutes and six hours to restart. The time they
wasted troubleshooting infrastructure issues has also been
eliminated, allowing developers to focus more on their code.
• Increased machine performance – The integrated system
improves provisioning and testing speed.
• Greater development confidence, less frustration – When
tests fail now, developers know with certainty that they are
chasing bugs rather than experiencing a failure in the testing
infrastructure.
• 100 percent uptime – Tests that do require restarts are not
infrastructure issues. According to Stevenson, “Vblock has
delivered 100 percent uptime.”
Because Vblock represents the next evolution of IT—one that
unleashes simplicity by delivering the extraordinary efficiency and
business agility of virtualization and cloud computing—the CF
team is confident its new solution will continue to deliver results.
“We are thrilled with Vblock. It’s stunningly successful and it just
works,” concludes Stevenson.
LEARN MORE
To learn more about our products, services, and solutions, visit us
at pivotal.io.