Plaza Indonesia Improves IT Flexibility, Agility, and Availability with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Located in central Jakarta, Plaza Indonesia is in the property development and management business. In 1990, it was the first high-end shopping center to host luxury brands in Indonesia. Plaza Indonesia owns nine properties, including Grand Hyatt Jakarta Hotel, Plaza Indonesia Shopping Center, The Plaza Office Tower and Keraton apartments.

Company headquarters wanted to virtualize

With an eye on the future, Plaza Indonesia sought to improve efficiency and cut costs through server consolidation. Its old servers broke down approximately every three months, impacting business operations and continuity. The old physical servers were also running out of space and becoming more costly to maintain.

Plaza Indonesia is in the property business, and thus very conscious of space usage. The company wanted to use only blades to minimize the space needed and cost of the space, as well as green computing considerations.

It also wanted to be able to increase IT service agility through load balancing and rapid server provisioning, and improve system recovery, business continuity and high availability. With a smaller office site already virtualized, Plaza Indonesia decided to adopt virtualization technology for its headquarters.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on intel xeon processor-based servers offered fast implementation and high performance

Plaza Indonesia started looking for a solution that is easy to manage, secure, low cost, and highly available to ensure business continuity.

After intensive industry research and benchmarking, Plaza Indonesia decided to virtualize its web-based applications and Microsoft SQL on its new technology platform. Three Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor hosts run on HP Proliant BL460c G6 Server Blades with Intel Xeon 5600 processors. The hypervisor hosts support 10 virtual machines. The guest operating systems for the virtual machines are Microsoft products such as Windows Server and
Exchange.

“We rely on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Intel Xeon processor-based servers, because of the simple licensing and ease of management compared to other competitive products,” said Elvin Triputra, IT manager, Plaza Indonesia.

Plaza Indonesia values Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization features such as the graphical user interface, high availability, live migration, system scheduler,
and maintenance manager as these met the objective of ensuring business continuity. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was easy to learn and saved time on
server provisioning.

The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with HP Proliant BL460c G6 Server Blade running on Intel Xeon 5600 Processors was smooth and progressed according to the company’s IT timeline. The new solution is reliable, stable, and easy-to-manage. It makes server deployment quicker–from four months previously to just one month now–and improves the performance and security of servers.

“Although VMware appeared to have more features, we found that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offered better performance and security,” said Triputra.

Maximizing existing resources reduces cost

Plaza Indonesia now pays as little as one-seventh of the cost demanded by Red Hat’s competitors for virtualization solutions. The organization cuts costs by consolidating old servers instead of buying entirely new hardware to support growth.

“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has helped us maximize and better utilize our existing server and IT resources, cutting costs by half and saving us from having to invest in new hardware. This ultimately lowers our total cost of operation,” said Triputra.

Plaza Indonesia’s IT service has increased flexibility and agility through load balancing and rapid server provisioning, thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Business continuity is now assured with improved system recovery and high availability.

With the new Red Hat solution in place, Plaza Indonesia is able to deliver better service to its employees and meet service level agreements.

“All our systems are now highly available. Maintenance can be planned without disrupting users. This reduces downtime while improving efficiency, as less space and power are consumed,” said Tiputra.

With the success of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization implementation, Plaza Indonesia is now planning to implement a virtualized disaster recovery center.