CSC Partners With VCE to Jump-Start Cloud Business With Vblock™ Infrastructure Platforms

 

Challenge

CSC’s “business first” approach to customer engagements is focused on tailoring solutions and services to the specific business objectives of every client. To follow this practice in the cloud, CSC needed an infrastructure with the utmost in agility, availability, performance, and security to meet its clients’ requirements for security, transparency and ability to quickly move office productivity and enterprise applications like SAP to the cloud. With the Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, CSC found the perfect match: a flexible and extensible converged infrastructure designed from the ground up for cloud.

“Our cloud business is accelerating quickly as more clients recognize the agility and cost advantages,” says Siki Giunta, vice president, cloud computing and software services, CSC. “As a VCE partner, we’re able to collaborate at the development level to deliver a highly adaptive and efficient cloud solution that combines our company’s industry expertise with best-of-breed technologies from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. VCE brings together the critical infrastructure components in a standardized Vblock platform that’s pre-integrated and tested. Vblock platforms enable us to deploy quickly and keep our internal resources focused on meeting each customer’s unique needs.”

Solution

Vblock Infrastructure Platforms provide CSC with a complete cloud infrastructure comprised of Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) blade servers, Cisco networking components, EMC storage systems, and VMware vSphere virtualization technology. CSC is using the Vblock platforms to support two new cloud offerings: CSC CloudCompute and CSC BizCloud. CloudCompute is a standard Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in all CSC global cloud datacenters and serves as the IaaS layer of CSC BizCloud, an innovative out-of-the-box private cloud, billed as a service, designed for rapid deployment on a customer’s premises.

“We selected the Vblock platform because it contains all state-of-the-art technology required for enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle Financials and other high-demand, business-critical environments we support,” notes Giunta. “The UCS fabric from Cisco was built specifically with cloud in mind. EMC has the largest selection of storage options to meet our customers’ diverse needs with unbeatable protection. And VMware is the de facto standard for virtualized environments. All our customers have VMware-enabled workloads, and they are the perfect target market for our cloud offerings.”

Results

Pre-integrated Platforms Ramp Up New Cloud Business Quickly Through its partnership with VCE, CSC has ramped up its cloud business quickly and has grown at a rapid pace.

“Working with VCE, we have all the resources needed to get to market quickly,” says Giunta. “Because the Vblock platform is pre-integrated, and we have great collaboration between our teams, we’re able to deliver a complete cloud infrastructure in just 10 weeks. This has allowed us to jump-start our business with seven BizCloud infrastructure deployments and six more anticipated by year end. Our pipeline has increased by at least 500 percent in just eight months.”

Giunta adds, “The solutions we’re building on Vblock platforms allow our customers to gain the agility they need regardless of business model—whether it's our on-site BizCloud private cloud or off-premises public or virtual private cloud or a hybrid solution. Whatever option they choose, we can provide a consistent business model.”

Open, Scalable Infrastructure Delivers High Performance for Big Workloads in the Cloud Many of CSC’s customers are large enterprises and government agencies looking to gain agility, mitigate risk and reduce costs. In addition, they often need the performance to handle large workloads. Vblock platforms are pre-configured to simplify workload balancing and dynamically tune the environment to optimize performance.

“Vblock systems provide us with an open, highly scalable infrastructure that is ideal for cloud,” says Giunta. “Our customers can grow at their own pace without overspending on infrastructure or risking a shortage of capacity. Vblock platforms also deliver the performance they need to run demanding applications such as SAP in the cloud.”

Giunta explains, “During an internal POC, CSC tested SAP HR on a Vblock platform. We saw an immediate performance increase. Results like these provide a very compelling value proposition to our customers and give us the confidence to offer competitive SLAs [service-level agreements] with full monetary recourse for all our cloud solutions.”

Collaborative Partnership Builds Competitive Advantage “By partnering with VCE, we can help our customers accelerate their journey to the cloud,” adds Giunta. “VCE and CSC are working together to develop a roadmap for the next generation of solutions that our customers need for cloud computing.

“VCE is really much more than a vendor. They stand alongside us in the field with both pre-sales and support, and work with us through every stage of solution development. When our customers see the close relationship we have with VCE, it gives them a lot of confidence in our cloud offerings and makes us stronger competitively. This is a partnership for the long term.”

About Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)

A Fortune 150 company, CSC is one of the world’s largest and most respected providers of information technology solutions and services. Since 1959, the company has helped its clients tackle some of the most complex business challenges—from improving customer service to protecting information assets to achieving globalization. Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 93,000 employees and reported revenue of $16.2 billion for the 12 months ended July 1, 2011.