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Acuity Brands Lighting,
the world's largest
manufacturer of lighting
fixtures, faced a
dilemma not uncommon
to large enterprises: The very
IT infrastructure it had built to
deliver excellent customer service
had become unwieldy, costly and
difficult to manage. New applications
and growing business volume
had led to server sprawl that
drained time and money from
IT operations.
Acuity Brands Lighting is a
division of Georgia-based Acuity
Brands, whose 2006 net sales
were more than $2.4 billion.
Backed up by a strong sales and
distribution network, outstanding
logistics operations and a superior
customer service organization,
Acuity produces quality lighting
products at 18 locations throughout
the United States, Europe,
Canada and Mexico. "Our organization
strives to be easy to do
business with in everything we
do," says Jim Draughn, Acuity
Brands Lighting's director of
enterprise engineering.
PowerEdge for
Consolidation
To consolidate servers and
streamline its IT operations,
Acuity turned to trusted technology
partner Dell. After consulting
with the account team and Dell
Services, Acuity decided to deploy
a virtualized server infrastructure
that would vastly reduce the number
of physical servers in its data
center. "We've been a Dell customer
for a long time," says
Draughn. "They work hard to keep
us up to date on the latest trends
in technologies that can bring
value to our business."
Today approximately 150 virtual
machines running Microsoft®
Windows® and Linux on Dell
PowerEdge Servers comprise
Acuity's virtualized server farm.
In its Windows environment,
Acuity runs Microsoft
Active Directory®,
Microsoft Exchange,
Microsoft Internet
Information Server,
and a number of other
applications. "Because
Dell PowerEdge servers
are so tightly integrated
with Windows, we can
get applications up and
running very quickly,"
Draughn notes. "The
dual-core Intel® Xeon®
processor–based
architecture PowerEdge 2950
servers are also extremely fast."
In the Linux environment, Acuity
runs Oracle E-Business Suite and
a 2 TB Oracle database, which
resides on a six-node cluster, to
support its sales and distribution
network, including order entry,
manufacturing, distribution, human
resources and financial operations.
"The biggest advantage to
running the Oracle applications on
Dell hardware is the scalability," Draughn says. "Instead of buying
a big UNIX® server, which we
would have to replace when we
run out of capacity, we started
with a cluster and simply add
nodes to increase capacity."
Virtualization also has enabled
Acuity to greatly expand its test
and development environment.
"Testing can start in a day, rather
than a week or two," says
Draughn. "Ultimately, virtualization
helps us do a better job of
working out software bugs before
systems go into production."
To keep tabs on the health of
its systems, Acuity uses Dell
OpenManage Systems Management
software. Built on the
principle of open systems, Dell
OpenManage provides robust,
flexible systems management
tools designed to help IT administrators
proactively control server
operations. "We use Dell
OpenManage's IT Assistant to
push out BIOS and conduct
upgrades—a process that was
previously manual," Draughn
explains. "Now, not only are our
upgrades far less labor-intensive,
but Dell OpenManage also helps
us keep accurate records of which
servers are up to date, and which
need upgrades."
VMware enables
manageability
To enable virtualization, Acuity
runs VMware ESX Server, a software
application that optimizes
hardware utilization and flexibility
for virtual machines running
multiple application environments.
"One of the biggest benefits of
the virtualized environment is
ease of management," explains
Draughn. "Now we can use far
less hardware—which means
fewer physical servers to maintain
and oversee."
Acuity takes advantage of
VMware VirtualCenter software to
provision virtual machines, ensure
application availability, and monitor
the performance of both physical
and virtualized servers. "We use
VirtualCenter for load balancing
and to control resources," notes
Draughn. "When we see that one of
our servers has a bit too much load
on it, we move resources around to
spread the workload."
SAN boosts app
performance
To protect its mission-critical business
data, Acuity deployed a SAN
based on several Dell/EMC Fibre
Channel RAID arrays. "We felt that
this solution gave us the best
price-performance, along with
Dell's best-in-class services and
support," says Landon Johnson,
Acuity's manager of server engineering.
"If there's ever a problem,
we just call Dell's technical
support team and they quickly
mobilize the resources we need."
For Acuity, the primary appeal
of the SAN is application performance,
closely followed by storage
consolidation and manageability.
"We've seen up to two and three
times an increase in application
performance and back-ups since
we've moved to the SAN,"
Draughn adds.
Virtually indispensable
services
As a part of its belief in teaming
with trusted technology partners,
Acuity works extensively with Dell
Services. "When we began the virtualization
project, Dell Services
helped assess our environment to
identify the applications that were
prime candidates for virtualization,"
Draughn says. "In addition,
they helped elaborate on our
vision of the virtual architecture
and gave us some direction on
how to use best practices to get
the most out of the environment."
Dell Services provided the
expertise, the road map and the
design for implementing our systems,
according to Johnson.
"Their contacts with vendors like
VMware, which spent time onsite
to help us design our systems for
future growth, were invaluable."
Acuity knows that whatever
happens, its IT department will
always be backed by Dell Platinum
Support. "We have been very
pleased with the support we have
received from Dell," Draughn says.
"There have even been a few occasions
where issues have involved
multiple vendors. Dell always
takes the lead and helps solve the
problem. That kind of support and
partnership is what makes our
relationship with Dell so strong."
Virtualization frees IT
Since deploying the virtualized
environment on Dell servers,
Acuity has greatly streamlined its
systems management environment.
"Before we virtualized, the
vast majority of our servers were
utilized at just 10 or 15 percent,
and it took us two or three weeks
to procure and build a server for
an end user," Draughn says. "With
virtualization, we have much less
physical hardware to manage. We
can deploy a new server in just two
or three hours, and our IT staff can
now focus on strategic initiatives."
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