USERS OF WEBEX are able to conduct meetings in real time across all geographies on all internet connected devices, in high definition video and audio, resulting in clearer pictures, more effective communications, and more getting done. Chances are if you have ever watched a webinar or been in a virtual meeting room, then you have experienced a WebEx offering.
As a division of Cisco, WebEx experienced tremendous growth and the synergies that come from being a part of the industry standard for networking hardware. Keeping up with the bandwidth and infrastructure requirements to support that growth resulted in numerous technical challenges.
WebEx offers its services on Cisco owned infrastructure (cloud-based) as well on customer owned private cloud hardware deployed outside of Cisco managed facilities. Remotely managing the variety of hardware and software configurations that are possible within
this environment requires a broad skillset and a commitment to excellent customer service.
The challenge
Since the year 2000, the pace of global business has increased substantially. Concurrent with the change in business speed and innovation has been the demand to span many global geographies with reliable communications, products, and services. The business world has come to count on the always available teleconference and virtual meeting room services of the WebEx operation of Cisco Systems in order to facilitate better understanding and smoother delivery of products and services. Keeping up with this demand for services meant that WebEx had to grow its data centre infrastructure and its global footprint. Planning for that growth required information.
Meanwhile, WebEx was occasionally running its hardware at such high levels that they exceeded the capacity of the power circuits in both their internal data centres and colocation facilities. Action needed to be taken to correct this situation while still enabling WebEx to make the most efficient use of the available power.
WebEx management further sought to understand which of their various services were responsible for using the most resources — hardware, power, and so forth, in order to maximize revenues and profits.
The solution
WebEx elected to pursue a course of investigation and analysis that required a granular picture of its application-centric hardware implementations and corresponding power usage profiles. To accomplish this, WebEx decided to retool their data centres with intelligent power strips having the ability to remotely report power consumption. Coupled with the desire to reduce the number of instances requiring a “remote hands” service call to their colocation facilities, WebEx decided that remote power outlet management was also a necessity.
With the help of a Server Technology (STI) Power Strategy Expert, WebEx chose CDUS from the Switched product family. The breadth of Switched products offered, coupled with the regulatory requirements of the numerous geographies needed to be supported made STI a logical choice for Cisco WebEx.
In order to gather and analyze the data available from the widely deployed Switched CDUS, WebEx also implemented Sentry Power Manager (SPM), the award-winning power management solution from STI.
The ability of STI to support WebEx with the right products, in the right geographies, at the right price made them the right choice.
Business benefits
Like so many things in life, WebEx learned that the quality of what you get out of a system depends largely on what effort and data you put into it. WebEx spent more than a year to deploy and implement everything. By configuring their CDUS with appropriate capacity warning levels, strip and outlet naming, and outlet management restrictions, WebEx maximized the effectiveness of their power management tools.
WebEx is now able to deploy hardware in a row within the data centre that exceeds the rated power capacity of the row, but maintain the aggregate load below the circuit’s ability to deliver. WebEx achieved this through analysis of power consumption of the hardware in each rack, and having tight controls on any additions to a given cabinet.
The various services within WebEx now know how much power their hardware consumes in each facility, thus enabling them to know what to expect as they expand beyond their current data centre footprint. Uptime has also improved, as the number of breaker trips has been greatly reduced. And the number of calls for “remote hands” support has dropped thanks to the remote outlet reset capability of the Switched CDUS.
The ability to have temperature and humidity probes plugged into the Switched CDUS has resulted in the ability to double-check the environmental conditions reported by the colocation facilities as well as the measurements coming from the internals of many pieces of the hardware WebEx had deployed. This lets WebEx double-check whether or not hardware is failing or about to fail.
