Le Moyne College Accelerates IT Innovation with Help from VMware View VDI Solution Provider SMP

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on how a mid-sized college harnessed server virtualization as a stepping stone to VDI.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how higher education technology innovator, Le Moyne College in upstate New York, has embraced several levels of virtualization as a springboard to client-tier virtualization benefits.

We'll see how Le Moyne worked with technology solutions provider Systems Management Planning, Inc. to make the journey to deep server virtualization and then move to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and we will see how they've done that in a structured, predictive fashion.

Learn here how a medium-sized, private college like Le Moyne teamed with a seasoned technology partner to quickly gain IT productivity payoffs via VDI, amid the demanding environment and high expectations of a college campus. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here to share their virtualization journey story are Shaun Black, IT Director at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. Welcome, Shaun.

Shaun Black: Good morning, and thanks for having me, Dana. It's wonderful talking to you.

Gardner: We're glad to have you. We're also here with Dean Miller, Account Manager at Systems Management Planning or SMP based in Rochester, New York. Hello, Dean.

Dean Miller: Good morning, Dana.

Gardner: Shaun, let me start with you. I'm thinking that doing IT at a college comes with its own unique challenges. You have a lot of very smart people. They're able to communicate well. They're impassioned with their goals and tasks. Is doing IT there like being in a crucible? And if it's a tough environment, given the user expectations, why did you choose to go to VDI quickly?

Black: I think you characterized it very well, Dana. There is tremendous diversity in the college and university environment. Our ability to be responsive as an IT organization is incredibly crucial, given the range of different clients, constituents, and stakeholders that we have. These include our students, faculty, administrators, fundraisers, and the like. There's a wide variety of needs that they have, not to mention the higher education expectations in a very much open environment.

We've been leveraging virtual technology now for a number of years, going back to VMware Desktop, VMware Player, and the like. Then, in 2007 we embraced ESX Virtual Server Technology and, more recently, the VMware VDI to help us meet those flexibility needs and make sure that the staff that we have are well aligned with the expectations of the college.

Gardner: Why don't you give us a sense of the size, how large of an organization you are? For people who aren’t familiar with Le Moyne, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the type of college you are.

Equal footing

Black: Le Moyne is a private, Catholic, Jesuit institution located in Syracuse, New York. We have about 500 employees and we educate roughly 4,000 students on an annual basis. We're the second youngest of 28 Jesuit college universities nationally. Some of our better-known peers are Boston College, Gonzaga, and Georgetown, but we like to think that we're on an equal footing with our older and more esteemed colleagues.

Gardner: And you're no newbie to virtualization, but you've moved aggressively. And now you're in the process of moving to VDI. Maybe you can just give us a brief history of how virtualization has been an important part of your IT landscape.

Black: It started for us back in the early 2000s, and was motivated by our management information systems program, our computer science-related programs, and their need for very specialized software.

A lot of that was started by using movable hard drives in very specific computing labs. As we progressed with them, and their needs continue to evolve, we just continued to find that the solutions that we had weren't flexible enough. They needed more and different servers in very specific needs.

From an IT workforce perspective, we were having the same problem most organizations have. We were spending a tremendous amount of time keeping existing systems working. We were finding that we weren't able to be as responsive to the academic environments, and to some degree, were potentially becoming an impediment in moving forward the success of the organization.

We started experimenting with it initially within a few classrooms and then realized that this is a great technology.

Virtualization was a technology that was out there. How could we apply this to our server infrastructure, where we were spending close to six months a year having one of our people swapping out servers?

We saw tremendous benefits from that, increased flexibility and an increased ability for our staff to support the academic mission. Then, as we start looking in the last couple years, we saw similar demands on the desktop side with requirements for new software and discussions of new academic programs. We recognized that VDI technology was out there and was another opportunity for us to try to embrace the technology to help us propel forward.

Gardner: And so given that you had a fairly good backing in virtualization generally -- and a very demanding and diverse set of requirements for your users -- tell me about how Systems Management Planning, or SMP, came into play and what the relationship between you two is?

Black: Our relationship with SMP and the staff there has been critical from back in 2006-2007, when we began adopting server virtualization. With a new technology, you try to bring in a new environment. There are learning and assimilation curves. To get the value out of that, to get the bang for the buck as quickly as possible, we wanted to identify a partner to help us accelerate into leveraging that technology.

They helped us in 2007 in getting our environment up, which was originally intended to be an 18-month transition of server virtualization. After they helped us get the first few servers converted within a couple weeks, we converted the rest of our environment within about a two-month period, and we saw tremendous benefits in server virtualization.

Front of the list

When we started looking at VDI, we had a discussion with a number of different partners. SMP was always at the front of our list. When we got to them, they just reinforced why they were the right organization to move forward with.

They had a complete understanding of the impact of desktop virtualization and how it has an impact on the entire infrastructure of an environment, not just the desktop itself, but the server infrastructure, storage infrastructure, network infrastructure.

They were the only organization we talked to, from the start, that began with that kind of discussion of what the implications are from a technology perspective, but also understanding what the implications are, and why you want to do this from a business perspective, and particularly an education perspective.

They brought very experienced people to help us through the process of assimilating.

They are already working with a number of different higher education institutions in the New York region. So they understood education. It's just a perfect partnership, and again, they brought very experienced people to help us through the process of assimilating and getting this technology implemented as quickly as possible and putting it to good use.

Gardner: Dean Miller at SMP, how typical is Le Moyne's experience, in terms of the pilot, moving toward server virtualization and then starting to branch out and take advantage of that more holistic approach that Shaun just described that will then lead to some of these VDI benefits? Is this the usual path that you see in the market?

Miller: It is, and we like to see that path, because you don't want to disappoint your users with the virtual desktop. They just want to do their job and they don't want to be hung up with something that's slow. You want to make sure that you roll out your virtual desktops well, and you need the infrastructure behind that to support that.

So yes, they started with a proof of concept which was a limited installation, really just within the IT department, to get their own IT people up to speed, experimenting with ThinApp and ThinApping applications. That went well. The next step was to go to the pilot, which was a limited roll out with some of the more savvy users. That seemed to go pretty well, and then, we went for a complete implementation.

It's fairly typical, and it was a pleasure working with this team. They recognized the value of VDI and they made it happen.

Gardner: And is there anything unusual or specific to Le Moyne in this regard?

Miller: No, I don't think there was anything unusual. It went pretty smoothly. We've been doing quite a few rollouts, and it went well.

Gardner: Tell us a bit about SMP. What type of organization are you? Are you regional, across the globe, or the country? We want to know a little more about your services and your company?

Focus on data center

Miller: We're Systems Management Planning. We're a women-owned company. We're headquartered in Rochester, New York, and were founded in 1997. Our focus is in the data center, implementing virtualization, both server and desktop virtualization, storage virtualization, and networking.

Our expertise in VMware and its complementing technologies allowed us to grow at a rate of about 30 percent year over year. We're recognized in the "Rochester Business Journal Top 100." This past year, we're ranked number six, based on growth.

We have offices in Rochester, Albany, and Orlando, Florida, and we use virtual desktops throughout our organization. This gives us the ability to spin up desktops or remote offices quickly. You could say we practice what we preach.

It's a technical organization. In fact, we have more engineers than salespeople on staff, which in my experience is pretty unusual. And we have more technical certification than any partner in upstate or western New York that I know of. I'm pretty sure of that.

VMware has recognized SMP as a premier partner. We're also on the VMware technical advisory board and we're really proud of that fact. We work closely with VMware, and they bounce a lot of ideas and things off our engineering team. So, in a nutshell, that’s SMP.

We are still in the process of rolling this out and we will be for another 12 months.

Gardner: Shaun, Dean has brought up an interesting point. If you're going to do VDI, you’ve got to do it right, having the word get out across the campus that the apps are slow or the storage isn't there sufficiently, it's going to really sound the death knell for the cause.

What did you do to make sure that that initial rollout was successful, that the performance was either at or better than the previous methods? Then, tell us a little bit about what you came back with in terms of their impression.

Black: It's what we continue to do, because we are still in the process of rolling this out and we will be for another 12 months. That’s probably the key component, as Dean mentioned.

We've been very methodical about going through an initial proof of concept, evaluating the technology, and working with SMP. They been great at informing us what some of the challenges might be, architecting an underlying infrastructure, the servers and the network.

Again, this is an area where SMP has informed us of the kinds of challenges that people have in virtual desktop environments, and how to build an environment that’s going to minimize the risk of the challenges, not the least of which are bandwidth and storage.

Methodical fashion

Then, we're being very deliberate about how we roll this out, and to whom, specifically so that we can try to catch some of these issues in a very methodical fashion and adjust what we're doing.

We specifically built the environment to try to build in an excess capacity of roughly a third to support business growth, as well as to support some variations in utilization and unexpected needs. You do everything you can in IT to anticipate what your customers are going to be doing, but we all know that on a day-to-day basis, things change, and those can have pretty dramatic consequences.

So we try to factor in enough head room to make sure that those kinds of situations wouldn’t negatively impact us. But the biggest thing is really just being very methodical and measured in throwing these technologies out.

With regard to the members of the pilot team, I’ll give a lot of kudos and hats-off to them, because they suffered through a lot of the learning curve with us in figuring out what some of these challenges are. But that really helped us, as we got to what we consider the second phase of the pilot this past fall. We were actually using a production environment with a couple of our academic programs in a couple of classrooms. Then we began to go into full production in the spring with our first 150 production users.

Gardner: And just to be clear, Shaun, what VMware products are you using? Are you up to vSphere 5, is this View 5, or you're using the latest products on that?

There are a couple different ways that we like to measure. I’d like to think of it as both dollars and delight.

Black: I understand that View 5.1 has recently been released. But at the time we rolled it out, vSphere, ThinApp, and View 5, were the latest and greatest with the latest service patches and all, when we initially implemented our infrastructure in December.

It's one of the areas where we're going to be leveraging SMP on a regular basis, given that they're dealing with the upgrades more frequently. My staff is helping us maintain the current and make sure we are taking maximal advantages of the incremental features and major innovations that VMware adds.

Gardner: Now, as you're rolling this out, it's probably a bit early to come up with return on investment (ROI) or productivity improvement metrics for the VDI, but how about the server virtualization, in general, and the modernization that you're going about for your infrastructure? Do you have a sense of whether this is a ROI type of benefit? What other metrics do you use to decide that this is a successful effort?

Black: Certainly, there's an ROI. There are a couple different ways that we like to measure. I’d like to think of it as both dollars and delight. From a server virtualization perspective, there's a dollar amount. We extended the lifecycle of our servers from a three-year cycle to five years. So we get some operational as well, as some capital cost savings, out of that extension.

Most significantly, going to the virtual technology on the servers, one motivator for us on the desktop was what our people are doing. So it's an opportunity-cost question and that probably, first and foremost, is the fundamental measure I'm using. Internally, we're constantly looking at how much of our time are we spending on what we call "keep the lights on" activity, just the operations of keeping things running, versus how much time we're investing on strategic projects.

Free up resources

Second to that, are we not investing enough time such that strategic projects are being slowed down, because IT hasn’t been able to resource that properly. From the perspective of virtualization, it certainly allowed us to free resources and reallocate those to things that the colleges deem more appropriate, rather than the standard kind of operational activities.

Then, just in regard to the overall stability and functionality in an environment is what I think of as a delight factor, the number of issues and the types of outages that we've had as a result of virtualization technology, particularly on the server front. It's dramatically reduced the pain points, even from hardware failures, which are bound to happen. So generally, it increased overall satisfaction of our community with the technology.

On the desktop front, we were much more explicit in building a pro forma financial model. We're going forward with that, and the expectation is that we are going to be able to reallocate, once we complete the rollout, a full-time equivalent employee. We're not going to have someone having to spend basically a year’s worth of time every year just shuffling new PCs onto desktops.

We're also expecting, as a result of that, that we're going to be able to be much more responsive to the new requests that we have, the various new software upgrades, whether it would be Windows, Office, or any of the various packages that are used in the academic environment here.

So we're expecting that’s going to contribute to overall satisfaction on the part of both our students, as well as our faculty and our administrators, having the tools that they need to do their job in the databases and be able to take advantage of them.

We're also expecting, as a result of that, that we're going to be able to be much more responsive to the new requests that we have.

Gardner: Just quickly on the cost equation for your client hardware, are you going to continue to use the PCs as these VDI terminals or are you going to be moving at some point to thin or zero clients? What are the implications for that in terms of cost?

Black: We do intend to extend the existing systems. We had been on a four-year lifecycle. We're expecting to extend our existing systems out to about seven years, but then, replacing any of that equipment with thin or zero clients, as those systems age out. Certainly, one of the benefits we did see of going to virtual is the ability to continue to use that hardware for a longer period of time.

Gardner: Okay. Dean Miller, is this experience that we are hearing from Le Moyne and Shaun, indicative of the ROI and economics of virtualization generally? That is to say a really good return on the server and infrastructure, but then perhaps higher financial benefits when you go to the full VDI, when you can start to really realize the efficiencies and cost-reduction of administration?

Miller: Absolutely. Le Moyne College, specifically Shaun Black and his team, saw the value in virtualizing their desktops. They understood the savings in hardware cost, the energy cost, the administrative time, and benefits from their remote users. I think they got some very positive feedback from some of the remote users about View. They had a vision for the future of desktop computers, and they made it happen.

Gardner: In looking to the future, Shaun. Is this setting you up for perhaps more ease in moving toward a variety of client endpoints. I'm thinking mobile devices. I'm thinking bring your own device (BYOD) with students working from campus, but then remotely on the weekends from home, that sort of thing. How does this set you up in terms of some of these future trends around mobile, BYOD, and consumerization?

Laying the foundation

Black: It lays the foundation for our ability to do that. That was certainly in our thinking in moving to virtual desktop. It wasn’t what we regard as a primary motivator. The primary motivator was how to do better what we’ve previously done, and that’s what we built the financial model on. We see that just as kind of an incremental benefit, and there may be some additional costs that come with that that have to be factored in.

But from the perspective of recognizing that our students, faculty, and everyone want to be able to use their own technology, and rather than having us issue them, be able to access the various software and tools more effectively and more efficiently.

It even opens up opportunities for new ways of offering our academic courses and the like. Whether it would be distance or the students working from home, those are things that are on our shortlist and our radar for opportunities that we can take advantage of because of the technology.

Gardner: Then, also looking at value from a different angle, is there anything about the VDI approach, the larger virtualization efforts that brings more control to your data, thinking about security, compliance, protecting intellectual property, storage, recovery, backup, even disaster recovery (DR). So how about going down that lane, if you will, of data lifecycle implications?

Black: That’s another great point, and again another one of the areas that was in our thinking in regard to the strategy. The idea, particularly for our mobile workers who have laptops, instead of them taking the data with them, to keep that data here on campus. We'll still provide them with the ability to readily access that and be just as effective and efficient as they currently are, but keeping the data within the confines of the campus community, and being able to make sure that’s backed up on a routine basis.

It's not just a control perspective, but it's also being able to offer more flexibility to people.

The security controls, better integration of View with our Windows server environment, and our authentication systems are all benefits that we certainly perceive as part of this initiative. It's not just a control perspective, but it's also being able to offer more flexibility to people, striking that balance better.

Gardner: Dean Miller, back to you. I should think that given that you have a large cross-section of customers, global concerns, and large US companies as well as small and medium-sized organizations like Le Moyne, that these data lifecycle management control security issues must be a big driver. Is that what you’re finding?

Miller: We’re seeing that in higher education as well as in Fortune 500s, even small and medium businesses (SMBs), the security factor of keeping all the data behind the firewall and in the data center, rather than on the notebooks out in the field, is a huge selling point for VDI and View specifically.

Gardner: Let's talk about lessons learned and sharing some of that. Shaun, if you were to do this over again, or you wanted to provide some insights to somebody just beginning their virtualization journey, are there any thoughts, any 20/20 hindsight conclusions, that you would share with them?

Black: For an organization that’s our size, a medium business, I'd say to anybody to be looking very hard at this, and be looking at doing it sooner, rather than later. Obviously, every institution has its own specific situation, and there are upfront capital costs that have to be considered in moving forward this. But if you want to do it right and if you’re going to do that, you have to make some of the capital investment to make that happen.

Sooner rather than later

But, for anybody, sooner rather than later. Based on the data we've seen from VMware, we were in the front five percent of adopters. With VDI, I think we’re somewhere in maybe the front 15 or something like that.

So, we're a little behind where I’d like to be, but I think we’re really at the point where mainstream adoption is really picking up. Anyone who isn’t looking at this technology at this point is likely to find themselves at a competitive disadvantage by not realizing the efficiency that this technology can bring.

Gardner: Let me just explore that a bit more. What are the competitive advantages for doing this now?

Black: For us, it really gets down to, as I said earlier, opportunity cost in strategic alignment. If your staff are not focused, from an IT perspective, on helping your organization move forward, but just on keeping the existing equipment running, you’re not really contributing maximally, or as I would say, contributing maximally to move your organization forward.

So to the extent that you can reallocate those resources toward strategic type initiatives by getting them off of things that can be done differently and therefore done more effectively, any organization welcomes that.

In five years or whatever, the market will be matured enough that we could go to a desktop-as-a-service type environment and have the same level of flexibility and control.

Gardner: I guess I am thinking too that getting all your ducks lined up on the infrastructure, getting the planning in place and having these rollout milestones set and ready to be implemented frees you up to start thinking more about applications, making your innovation move from support to that innovative level.

Again, we talked about changing the types of applications, whether it's in delivery, maybe it's moving towards multitenancy, private cloud types of models. Before we sign off, any thoughts about what the implications long-term are for your ability to be leading agile vis-à-vis your application set?

Black: There's a lot of debate on this, but I've told many individuals on the campus, including my vice president, that I expect this to very likely be the last time that Le Moyne is required to make this kind of investment in capital infrastructure. The next time, in five years or whatever, the market will be matured enough that we could go to a desktop-as-a-service type environment and have the same level of flexibility and control.

So we can really focus on the end services that we’re trying to provide, the applications. We can focus on the implications for those, the academics, as opposed to the underlying technology and letting the organization have the time and the focus on the technology, maintaining that underlying infrastructure, take advantage of their competencies and allow us to focus on our core business.

We’re hoping that there's an evolution. Right now, we are talking with various organizations with regard to burst capacity, DR-type capabilities and also talking about our longer term desires to outsource even if some of the equipment is posted here, but ultimately, get most of the technology and underlying infrastructure in somebody else’s hands.

Insight question

Gardner: Dean, I just want to run that same kind of insight question by you. Clearly, Shaun has a track record, but you've got quite a bit more across different types of organizations. Is there a bit of advice that you would offer to companies as they’re beginning to think about virtualization as a holistic strategy for IT? What're some good concepts to keep in mind as you're beginning?

Miller: Well, that’s interesting. We were talking about virtual desktops, maybe two-and-a-half, three years ago. We started training on it, but it really hadn't taken off for the last year-and-a-half. Now, we’re seeing tremendous interest in it.

Initially, people were looking at savings for a hardware cost and administrative cost. A big driver today is BYOD. People are expecting to use their iPad, their tablet, or even their phone, and it's up to the IT department to deliver these applications to all these various devices. That’s been a huge driver for View and it's going to drive the View and virtual desktop market for quite a while.

We can really focus on the end services that we’re trying to provide, the applications.

Gardner: I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about how higher education technology leader, Le Moyne College in upstate New York, has embraced server-level virtualization as a springboard to client-tier virtualization benefits, and we heard how technology solutions provider, SMP, helped them make that journey in a structured predictive way.

I’d like to thank our guests for joining us on this BriefingsDirect podcast. We’ve been here with Shaun Black, IT director at Le Moyne College. Thank you so much, Shaun.

Black: Thank you.

Gardner: And we’ve been here with Dean Miller, Account Manager at SMP. Thank you, Dean.

Miller: Thanks, Dana. Thanks for the opportunity.

Gardner: You’re welcome. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: VMware.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on how a mid-sized college harnessed server virtualization as a stepping stone to VDI. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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