Responding to Business Needs Faster Through Hybrid Cloud Optimization
By moving nonproduction workloads to Azure Local while keeping other applications on-premises, CDW sees gains in agility and efficiency and enhances its capabilities around service delivery.
It’s advice that CDW regularly offers to many of its customers: When it comes to your technology stack, agility and resilience depend on diversification.
“Don’t put your eggs in one basket,” says Chris Monroe, CDW principal architect for platform engineering. “With any growing business, it’s important to have the technology to pivot when needed.”
Monroe and his colleague Justin Smith, CDW director of platform engineering, recently applied that philosophy to their own company’s operations when they led an initiative to optimize CDW’s hybrid data center. Over the course of four months and with diversification in mind, Smith, Monroe and others on the engineering team successfully shifted hundreds of virtual machines out of one virtualization platform and into Microsoft’s Azure Local.
Today, this upgraded infrastructure allows CDW to manage its workloads more efficiently, and that’s helped the company expand its capabilities. Most important, Smith says, it’s meant that CDW can better serve its customers.
“We wound up doing what our account managers would advise any company in a similar position to do,” he says. “We’ve made it possible to move workloads around seamlessly to fit the evolving needs of our business.”
Diversifying to Improve Performance
For years, CDW has relied on VMware to create and manage the company’s virtual machines. Virtualization allows multiple operating systems and applications to run simultaneously on a single physical server — an approach that optimizes hardware utilization while reducing costs and simplifying management.
“VMware is a robust, mature platform, and even to this day, we’ve had hardly any issues running it,” Smith says. The technology has been especially useful as CDW has expanded its operations. Today, the company has more than 15,000 coworkers and 1,000 technology vendor partners.
Still, in fall 2023, the engineering team decided to take advantage of an offer from Microsoft to become one of the first companies to pilot Azure Local. Then known as Azure Stack HCI, the solution allows businesses to run VMs, containers and Microsoft services on their own hardware while leveraging cloud-based tools available only in Azure.
“By diversifying and using both platforms, each for different workloads and purposes, we thought it would improve our ability to be flexible across our large technology stack,” Monroe says.
In collaboration with CDW partner HPE GreenLake, which provided the infrastructure needed to complete the trial, the pilot kicked off in early 2024. By later that spring, the team had seen enough.
“It’s a hybrid cloud solution built as hyperconverged infrastructure,” Monroe says. “Database performance, desktop delivery, the experience for employees — even with just the glimpse that we had, it was clear that it was going to enhance operations across the board.”
HPE GreenLake has been a “solid partner” and is one of the main reasons the company decided to deploy Azure Local, Smith adds.
“GreenLake is like an extension of my platform team,” he says. “It’s essential to how we manage our on-premises footprint, but also to how we maintain our agility and parallel presence in the cloud.”
As an HCI platform, Azure Local allows CDW to run Azure services locally in the company’s own on-premises data center. The hardware needed for Azure Local is provided by HPE GreenLake, which also offers managed services and support. GreenLake facilitates deployment of VMs, containers and services through its connection to Azure. Its consumption-based model allows CDW to scale Azure Local compute and storage up or down to meet the company’s evolving needs.
CDW customers who rely on HPE GreenLake infrastructure often contract with CDW Managed Services to handle management of the system, Smith says. “CDW can do for our customers what GreenLake is doing for us: serve as a trusted adviser who’s always there when and where you need them.”
800
The number of virtual machines CDW moved into Azure Local in just 4 months by working with GreenLake and using Veeam
Workload Migration: Decisions and Delivery
Once committed to the move, the first order of business for the platform engineering team was to work with HPE GreenLake to expand the systems they’d put in place for the pilot program. The company provides on-premises servers, software and services through a pay-per-use model, installing infrastructure and providing updates and support as needed.
As Smith and Monroe lined up their infrastructure, they also turned their attention to deciding which workloads and IT systems they wanted to keep on-premises. Latency-heavy applications, for example, would likely do best closer to the company’s onsite servers. The same could be said for tools such as programmable logic controllers, where performance could suffer with the slightest delay.
“Like many organizations, we have applications that were developed in-house or that run on typical mainframe-type technology that need to be central to our data center,” Smith says. “We also have certain use cases where an app may be really important to the business, but only occasionally, like once each quarter.”
CDW uses Citrix VDI to give employees access to virtual desktops and applications from their various devices, so one easy decision, according to Smith, was to run their Citrix environment on Azure Local. A virtual appliance within the Azure platform — the Azure Arc resource bridge — allows users to connect to cloud or on-premises infrastructure according to what works best for each application.
“It’s a matter of performance and cost-efficiency, and finding a balance between the various factors,” Smith says. “But no matter what, we always put our workloads where it makes the most sense to have them.”
As cloud-ready workloads were identified, the team used Veeam to safely facilitate the migration from VMware to Azure. “It was a lot of VMs, and you have to do it quickly, because you don’t want to cause any problems for people by making something unavailable when they need it,” Monroe explains.
Through Veeam, they created backups of the virtual machine data, “and that helped us move with speed,” he says.
“The biggest difference is our ability to react and respond to the needs of the business. We’re a lot quicker and nimbler than we used to be.”
— Chris Monroe, Principal Architect for Platform Engineering, CDW
From “Lift and Shift” to “Better and Faster”
The “big lift and shift,” as Smith describes it, was completed in fall 2024, four months after the real migration work kicked off. In that time, about 800 VMs were moved with the help of Veeam from VMware to Azure Local, he says.
Smith and Monroe both say the migration paid immediate dividends for CDW’s internal operations. “We shifted from traditional composable infrastructure, where storage, compute and networking were all in their own silos, to a hybrid cloud, hyperconverged approach where everything is integrated,” Monroe says.
The benefits they saw during their pilot of the Azure solution were there when the deployment was finished, he adds: “Everyone is reporting their applications are more stable, that things are running better and faster.”
At the end of the day, diversification improves CDW’s ability to turn on a dime — to meet not only the demands of its workers but also those of its customers. The platform engineering team originally saw Azure Local as a solution that would help IT staff manage operations more effectively and efficiently. As it turns out, that was part of the package, but it also came with a whole lot more.
“The biggest difference is our ability to react and respond to the needs of the business,” Monroe says. As CDW keeps growing and its customers do the same, they’re ready for anything that comes their way, thanks to their newfound workload flexibility.
“We’re a lot quicker and nimbler than we used to be,” he says. “I think that we’re better off all around.”