Autopilot - arago - The Automation Experts

Case Study
AutoPilot driven cloud operations from arago
enable downsizing from 62 to 9 servers at
Zumtobel Group while increasing performance

Management and
Project Managers
2
Tom Brady
CIO
Zumtobel Group
Michael Zanghellini
Project Manager
Zumtobel Group
Hans-Christian Boos
Managing Director
arago AG
Thorsten Hilger
Senior Automation Expert
arago AG

Chapter
1 Management Summary
Leveraging the hybrid cloud for IT on Demand
The royal theatre in Copenhagen, the Olympic
arena in Berlin, the hotel Carlton in the glamorous
St. Moritz, or the flagship store of Hugo Boss
in new trendy Meatpacking District in New York
– for the clients of Zumtobel lighting is more than
just light, it creates a special atmosphere, and
shapes the exceptional ambience of the respective
object. By providing several online services
the global player in the lighting industry supports
its internal and external lighting designers,
architects, and projects stakeholders around the
globe in creating these worlds of experience.
Thus, over the years more than 20 portal applications
have been developed in the whole Zumtobel
Group which includes besides the Zumtobel
brand also the UK based Thorn lighting brand
and the Tridonic components brand. These portal
applications provide real-time access to a variety
of backend-systems like SAP or the product
database via defined interfaces, and link them in
the portal according to the user processes. Since
2006, the operation of this portal environment
at the data centre site in Bregenz, Austria, has
been outsourced to arago. In order to renew the
3

contract in 2010 successfully, the Corporate IT of
the Zumtobel Group has specified two objectives:
First, the environment has to be become
more flexible, as the business being subject to
large fluctuations requires the support of rapid
scalable resources, and secondly the new agreement
should lead to a considerable reduction
in operating costs. The solution suggested by
arago, a AutoPilot driven hybrid cloud, has stood
the test in every respect: in less than 6 months
the automation professionals based in Frankfurt,
Germany, managed to successfully implement
the complete virtualization of the current server
environment consisting of 62 servers. Now the
new largely automated operated cloud configuration
comprises only 9 servers which may be expanded
by external cloud resources, if required.
Despite the reduced hardware equipment and
considerably reduced operating costs a significant
increase in performance could be achieved
since launching the real-time operations in
November 2010. “The e-business platform is our
bread-andbutter- business for further growth,”
states Tom Brady, CIO of Zumtobel Group. “The
different user groups demand top-level, stateof-art
online services at any time. In case we are
not able to provide them one time, we will lose
revenue and in the worst case our clients.” In
addition, the current platform not only ensures
the access to up-to-date Zumtobel product highlights,
planning specifications, and the traditional
4
e-business, which considerably supports revenue
generation in the most important sales regions.
Furthermore, visualizations of reference projects
become more and more important being available
in the portal with the respective planning
and project specifications, and recently may also
be downloaded as iPhone and iPad apps. With
every new application and every additional user
the requirements imposed on the e-business
platform increase, and what’s more the extensive
promotion of new products being launched in
March and October every year results in significant
access figure peaks. Despite the strategic
relevance of the platform, the CIO had to realize
distinct cost-reduction measures. “After taking
over this position in September 2009, I first of all
I reviewed all existing agreements,” remembers
Tom Brady. “Regarding this one I was aware: In
more than 60 servers with dozens of applications
there really had to be some potential for optimization.”
In cooperation with arago the starting
point was soon agreed. All in all the Zumtobel
Group servers provided much more computing
capacity than ever needed by the portal environment,
however the situation was the same as in
every other traditional data centre: While some
servers had hardly some work to do, others had
to process excessive works loads at peak times
which resulted in a continuous extension of
hardware to ensure the performance needed by
business users.

Chapter
2 Cloud is the Name of
the Alternative
At the beginning of 2010 arago presented its
concept to reduce these over-capacities at
Zumtobel. Hereto the server configuration has to
me migrated into a completely virtualized cloud
environment which would be able to leverage
much less hardware equipment. In contrast
to simple visualization which bundles several
virtual servers on a physical server in a fixed way,
all resources should be allocated completely
dynamically, i.e. without determining on which
physical machine the current virtual database or
application server instance is running. Especially
in the e-business environment, which often requires
short-term scaling or the integration of an
additional application, then no physical or virtual
systems have to be expanded with CPUs or storage.
Instead the additional application is setup
on this cloud, and as long as sufficient resources
are available in total, the application will be able
to run immediately. In addition, this hybrid cloud
configuration should also support the short-term
purchase of computing capacities such that a
short-term increased demand, e. g. due to a marketing
campaign or an analyst conference using
video streaming, will not lead to investments
in hardware which later will not be used any
6
more, and thus lead to an inevitable rise of fixed
costs. Compared to traditional physical or virtual
servers this approach promised the required
enhanced flexibility. Most of all the cloud system
enables the dynamic distribution of the available
total capacity of technical resources as required,
and not based on some assumptions made
during the design phase. In addition to automatic
load balancing this also provides maximum
reliability: In case a physical machine fails, the
respective virtual machines will simply continue
to run on another physical machine of the cloud.
This concept has convinced Brady straightaway:
“The benefits regarding costs and Green IT, but
most of all the ability to expand and also reduce
our capacities, if required, were really striking.”
However the experienced manager attached
great importance to the fact that business-critical
data and applications remained under control
of the company and were not transferred into a
public cloud: “It is correct and important for us to
be part of the cloud revolution. But by no means
I wanted to give up the safety to be able to go in
our data center and physically touch our cloud
configuration.”

Chapter
3 The Adequate Sizing
is the Key Point
After the basic decision has been made in favor
of the cloud, the project was launched in spring
2010 starting with an inventory control of the
existing servers and their CPUs, storage, and any
other performance-critical components. As the
existing servers needed to be replaced after five
years of service anyway, the company was able to
plan the new server environment without taking
the legacy systems into account. Dimensioned
with some additional capacity in order to be on
the safe side the calculations of the arago professionals
resulted in an demand of nine Dell R710
servers with Equalogic PS6000 storage subsystem
with a footprint of only 2 racks in the data center.
Compared to the so far more than 60 servers
the new acquisition should pay off solely based
on the savings made due to leased data centre
space, energy, and cooling within a few years.
Several virtualization solutions were taken into
account, but finally the decision was made for the
cloud infrastructure vSphere 4 of VMware. The
decision was based on the positive experience of
Zumtobel and arago, the strong market penetration,
and above all the support of temporary
external provisioning of single components
while maintaining a centralized management. In
addition to the Enterprise Plus edition comprising
the complete palette of additional features
for the cloud, VMware vCenter Application
Discovery Manager (ADM) is used which ensures
the permanent balance of the IT model with the
dynamic application environment of the Zumtobel
Group. The official launch was presented at a
kick-off event on June 30, 2010. From Zumtobel
Group project manager Michael Zanghellini and
the 10 members of the basic operating team and
the development team with 15 partial external
employees took part, the arago team of six professionals
was lead by project manager Thorsten
Hilger. “The schedule we have agreed on was very
ambitious,” states Michael Zanghellini. “Already in
November the cloud configuration was expected
to be in productive operation.”
7

Chapter
4 Leveraging the Cloud with
Automation Capabilities
To eliminate any risks Thorsten Hilger had the ordered
server hardware be sent to Frankfurt to the
data centre of arago first, where it was setup and
extensively tested, and then the Cloud software
was installed and tested. In addition, the IT professionals
enhanced the cloud configuration with
the arago AutoPilot for IT Operation automation
tool. “It is not possible to administrate such a
dynamically changing IT environment like the
cloud exclusively with traditional tools,” explains
Thorsten Hilger. “Accordingly, we count on the
arago AutoPilot for IT Operation to operate the
cloud infrastructure and the application environment,
and complemented it with the respective
knowledge modules for cloud optimization.” The
solution is based on a pool of rules for storing the
experiences regarding the processing of events,
and on an IT model which documents the dependencies
between IT and services. This way the
AutoPilot is able to track the dynamic changes
occurring in the IT infrastructure, and facilitates
the life of administrators by handling most of the
fault analysis and solution. After all systems were
operational a specialist forwarder shipped the
units to the data centre in Bregenz, where arago
put them into operation in the last week of August
. “At September 1st, the cloud was running,
although it was of course still ‘empty’,” remembers
Thorsten Hilger, who spent with his team at least
three days a week in the Zumtobel Group data
centre from that date on. “Although we are now
able to control nearly everything remotely, we
deliberately have decided us for ‘direct communication
and short ways’, because nothing should
go wrong.” During the next weeks all servers
and applications have been migrated one after
another to the new cloud configuration. For this
the project team elaborated a three-phased
concept: First, some few systems were migrated,
which have been virtualized in the traditional
way – basically applications which were too small
for having a server by their own. Thanks to the
virtualization technology used, they only needed
to be copied.
9

Chapter
5 Migration Successful
Most of the systems were automatically migrated
to the cloud by using the VMware tools, however
some downtime had be taken into account.
To minimize negative impacts on the users, the
project team bundled systems supporting the
same user community, and the migration was
performed in times out of the business hours or
at the weekend. “We have included the business
right from the start, aligned the time windows,
and specified the duration exactly – which we
had determined before at the test migration
–, and worked parallel whenever possible, in
order to be able to handle as much as possible
during a required downtime,” explains Michael
Zanghellini. “Thus we were able to minimize
the impacts on the users despite of our global
24 hours operations.” A third step involved the
systems which had to be reinstalled – in order
to upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit versions on this
10
occasion, for example –, or for which a manual
intervention was required due to other reasons.
The development team was well prepared and
performed the necessary adaptions, if required.
“Nothing unexpected had happened, the project
met the schedule, and we were able to finish it on
November 15,” states Michael Zanghellini gladly.
“Due to prepared images for typical Windows and
Linux configurations, new virtual systems may be
launched in the cloud configurations by the push
of a button at any time, and existing systems may
be expanded with additional CPU and storage
capacities, e. g. for a monthly closing.” Also, the
dynamic load balancing of the new cloud configuration
works very well. Despite of the significant
downsizing of the server environment, first
measurements show a noticeable increase in performance
for the users – about 1,700 employees
in 50 countries and external business partners.

Chapter
6 Benefits to Count On
Brady expresses satisfaction with the progress of
the project: “Implementation has been carried
out very well, and since that time our environment
is very stable, and also the feedback
regarding performance has been very, very
good.” However for a final assessment of the new
cloud configuration one experience is lacking:
“In case I call you and say, tomorrow I need more
CPU and storage, and this works, then the cloud
is truly worthwhile.” This is exactly what he will
try before the next press financial statements
conference in March. Then additional IT resources
will have to leased from the “public cloud”
to operate the Zumtobel website – in addition
to the well-known global cloud providers and
a local Telekom Austria cloud, the cloud resources
in the high security data centre of arago in
Frankfurt are also available as option. “In our fast
changing markets we must rely on the fact that
our IT is able to react in the same dynamic way as
our business does,” states Brady. “Here the cloud
is the perfect solution, from a technical point
of view and also from the charging model. With
a moderate base price we are able to add and
reduce capacities at any time, and we will always
pay only the services our business really needs.”
11

Overview of the project partners
The Zumtobel Group with headquarter in
Dornbirn, Austria, and about 7,500 employees
and a revenue of more than 1.1 billion Euro is
one of the few global players in the lighting
industry. The group of companies, which
evolved from the Elektrogeräte und Kunstharzpresswerk
W. Zumtobel KG founded in
the year 1950, has become the market leader
in Europe in the area of professional lighting,
and is a global leading company in the area
of operating devices and light control. The
VMware (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization
and cloud infrastructure, delivers
customer-proven solutions that accelerate IT
by reducing complexity and enabling more
flexible, agile service delivery. VMware enables
enterprises to adopt a cloud model that
addresses their unique business challenges.
VMware’s approach accelerates the transition
Automation represents a method commonly
used in all fully developed industries to transfer
risky, repetitive or simply boring tasks to
machines. We, arago AG based in Frankfurt on
the Main, specialise entirely in IT automation.
Working on behalf of our customers, our team
of experts achieve improvements in quality
in cost-intensive areas of IT while reducing
costs at the same time. This is where top-class
technology meets extensive market expertise.
12
business of the Zumtobel Group comprises
also professional interior and exterior lighting
with the brands Zumtobel and Thorn, lighting
components, control elements and modules
with the brand Tridonic, and innovative
LED technology across all brands. The global
company operates 21 production sites on
four continents, and has sales companies and
representatives in more than 70 countries.
www.zumtobelgroup.com
to cloud computing while preserving existing
investments and improving security and
control. With more than 250,000 customers
and 25,000 partners, VMware solutions help
organizations of all sizes lower costs, increase
business agility and ensure freedom of choice
www.vmware.de
Our mission is to automate the development,
management and operation of IT systems as
much as possible using intelligent software
tools. The continuously increasing complexity
of the IT landscape as well as the existing
skills shortage can thus be mitigated for good
within the existing budget.
www.arago.de

Appendix
A AutoPilot for IT Operation
The arago AutoPilot is a knowledge-based architecture,
which automatically – i.e. without
human intervention – analyses the possible
causes of incidents and changes in IT operation
and actively develops and implements
suitable strategies for solving the issues.
The AutoPilot can be used to automate virtually
all tasks currently performed by IT administrators
and IT experts. In its activities, the AutoPilot
How does the AutoPilot work?
The knowledge of your IT specialists is captured
in slim, modular and reusable knowledge items
(KIs) and linked to a model of your IT landscape.
When an administrative task (such as rectifying
an Exchange Server malfunction) needs to be
performed for a particular node in the model,
the AutoPilot can combine KIs to form a complete
action sequence.
It initiates, monitors and modifi es these actions
in the course of the analysis. It generates commands
– like an administrator does - to solve a
problem. At the same time, it documents
How is the AutoPilot used?
The AutoPilot can be integrated easily into mature
IT environments. It directly supports incident,
problem, change and event management
processes. Though, the existence of comprehensive
process structures is not an indispensable
prerequisite for its use. What is required is an
up-to-date IT model as well as appropriate monitoring
information – as is the case for classic IT
operation.
The AutoPilot enables you to apply the knowledge
that exists in your company in an automated
manner. It facilitates cost-eff ective, fl exible
and individual IT service management with
full documentation. Besides undertaking the
administrative activities arising in day-to-day
draws on a knowledge pool maintained by
your experts, similar to a wiki. The deposited
knowledge is used and consistently combined
to form new scripts to perform a diverse range
of tasks.
Using a model-based and algorithmic approach,
the AutoPilot supports your IT operation by
automating up to 80 % of all activities.
Visualisation of an AutoPilot issue
everything it does. If the AutoPilot cannot rectify
a malfunction by itself, all the information and
analysis results are fed into an integrated or
external ticket system in human-readable form
and passed on to a human IT specialist.
IT MODEL
KNOWLEDGE ITEMS
MONITORING
ACTIONS
DOCUMENTATION
Functionalities of the AutoPilot
AutoPilot
operation, the AutoPilot has the advantage that
by combining the stored modular knowledge
items it is also capable of responding to unforeseen
events.
13

CloudPilot for IT Operation
The arago CloudPilot is a special form of the
aforementioned AutoPilot, which concentrates
on the following two tasks:
1. Management of dependencies between
several cloud platforms
2. Management of the use of diff erent providers
for one cloud platform
14
To ensure that both areas are dealt with in the
CloudPilot, the AutoPilot software is supplied
with knowledge items matched to familiar
cloud infrastructures.
These are either used directly or can be adapted
to the specifi c environment by appropriate
changes.
What is the diff erence compared to conventional automation solutions?
Dynamic recombination
Thanks to its capability of dynamically recombining
operative knowledge, the AutoPilot is
also capable of responding to unknown events.
Individual application
The AutoPilot can be used in totally individual
applications as well as heterogeneous environments.
Response to changes
By maintaining the knowledge pool yourself,
you are independent of release cycles. This
enables a direct response to changes in your IT
landscape.
Benefi ts to you
+ Increased availability of the IT systems
+ Reduced response times
+ Improved service quality and compliance
+ Reduction in operating and support costs
+ Relieves your IT experts from reactive activities
Conservation of your operational
knowledge
The AutoPilot enables lasting documentation
of your company‘s existing operational knowledge.
Simple maintenance
The required manual maintenance does not
include all possible dependencies in each case
but merely the addition of the new or changed
information.
The payment model
The payment model stipulates payment only in
case of success, when incidents are dealt with in
a completely automated manner. Without any
licence fees and therefore with no risk for your
organisation.
Certifi ed by TÜV Rheinland:
The function scope and usability
of the AutoPilot

Appendix
B arago AG
arago at a glance
Automation is a widely used method of entrusting
machines with repetitive, risky or simply
boring tasks. Since arago was founded in 1995
we have relied on various automation approaches
with regard to costly IT service management
processes. Our expert team achieves an
improvement in quality for our customers in
cost-intensive areas of IT, while also reducing
costs.
This involves a combination of cutting edge
technology and sound market expertise. Our
mission is to automate the development,
management and operation of IT systems
through intelligent software tools. The steadily
arago off ers you better IT...
RUN
Concept
...to run
your business
with automated IT operation
In modern companies, a functioning IT infrastructure
is the basis for all business processes.
Do you want increased quality, high security
standards and revision-proof traceability with
falling costs? Better IT which is both mature and
advanced?If the answer is yes, arago is the right
company for you. It is our aim to increase our
OUR STRENGTHS
Innovative technology, qualifi ed,
dedicated employees and many
years of experience in the fi eld of
automated IT operation and portal
development.
increasing complexity of the IT landscape and
the current shortage of skilled workers can thus
be mitigated for good and within the available
budget. You benefi t from the expertise of an
experienced IT service provider with a performance-based
approach.
An experienced team
The arago team consists of highly qualifi ed and
experienced employees who continually analyse
the latest trends in the IT industry and build
their knowledge and skills.
...to support
your business
with automated information
management
SUPPORT CHANGE
customers’ value creation through matching IT
services.
arago’s key competences include fl exibility,
individuality, cutting edge technology and long
term experience.
WE OFFER
...to change
your business
with an automated framework
Flexible, tailored solutions, which
allow you to see results quickly
while you can concentrate entirely
on your core business.
15

arago Institut für komplexes
Datenmanagement AG
Eschersheimer Landstraße 526 - 532
60433 Frankfurt am Main
Tel: +49-69-40568-0
Fax: +49-69-40568-111
www.arago.de
www.automatisierungs-experten.de
AEC03_291211