Part of the international Dun & Bradstreet network, Altares provides
business information on more than 7.7 million companies in France
and more than 180 million companies worldwide. As the leading
provider of inter-business knowledge in France, Altares gives its clients
vital information on the businesses they engage with – whether they
are clients, prospects or suppliers – helping them make better business
decisions. Altares employs approximately 300 people in France and has
20 years of experience.
Altares supports business innovation with IBM BladeCenter
1. IBM Systems & Technology Group Professional Services
Smarter Computing
Altares supports
business innovation with
IBM BladeCenter
Succeeding with smarter computing from IBM
Part of the international Dun & Bradstreet network, Altares provides
Overview business information on more than 7.7 million companies in France
and more than 180 million companies worldwide. As the leading
The need provider of inter-business knowledge in France, Altares gives its clients
Support rapid growth in number and
variety of business systems while
vital information on the businesses they engage with – whether they
overcoming physical constraints on space are clients, prospects or suppliers – helping them make better business
and cooling in data centers. Create an decisions. Altares employs approximately 300 people in France and has
infrastructure capable of scaling and
20 years of experience.
adapting to new requirements without
downtime or loss of performance.
Driving data analysis
The solution
Altares built a new virtualized
Altares’ business depends on its ability to rapidly assimilate and
infrastructure running on IBM® analyze large volumes of data on global companies, then present it in
BladeCenter® servers, with Intel Xeon different ways to meet the varied needs of its broad client base. The
processors, and consolidated 175
company’s IT infrastructure and applications naturally play a key role
physical servers to just 24 blades. The
infrastructure is split between two data in its business operations. Yann de Pontbriand, Director of IT and
centers for added resilience. Operations at Altares, explains: “Our information system enables us to
The benefit
take raw information and, by refining it, supply high-value information
More compact and energy-efficient in support of better decision making.”
infrastructure delivers significant
CapEx and OpEx savings; rapid To enable faster time-to-market for new services and to reduce its
provisioning of new virtualized servers
operational costs, Altares wanted to move away from a one-application-
and orchestration of existing resources
enables Altares to respond faster to per-physical-server model. Equally, the lease on one of its existing
new revenue opportunities; reduced data centers was coming to an end, meaning that the company
manual administration frees up skilled
needed to rationalize its infrastructure so that it could be housed in a
IT employees to focus on value-add
services. smaller space. For all of these reasons, the existing infrastructure was
increasingly unable to meet the company’s present requirements or
support its future growth.
Altares considered proposals from several major vendors before
choosing to work with Overlap, an IBM Premier Business Partner,
on the deployment of an IBM BladeCenter solution with VMware
virtualization to replace its existing competitive hardware.
Christophe Le Caignec, IT Director at Altares, comments: “Our IT
infrastructure was no longer fit for the challenges we faced or for the
new strategic direction of the company. We needed to virtualize the
server landscape in order to create a more compact, efficient, flexible
and responsive platform to support business services.”
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Selecting IBM BladeCenter technology
Designed for Data In the initial deployment phase, Altares invested in eight IBM
• Altares generates, analyzes and presents BladeCenter HS21 blades configured as two 4-node clusters of
huge volumes of continually changing
VMware ESX Server and split between two different data centers.
data on millions of companies. The IBM
BladeCenter and VMware ESX Server Subsequently, the company has expanded the BladeCenter footprint
solution enables high-performance and increased its capabilities without needing to rearchitect the
analytics and extremely reliable reporting solution; the future-proof nature of the IBM solution was a major
to a demanding set of clients.
selling point.
Tuned to the Task
• Altares consolidated 175 standalone “The IBM BladeCenter solution enabled us to migrate our existing
servers to 24 IBM BladeCenter servers.
The new virtualized infrastructure enables
systems to run as virtual machines on VMware,” says Christophe Le
new business servers to be created with Caignec. “To date, we have virtualized around 75 percent of our legacy
precisely the required characteristics servers – 175 servers in total – to just 24 IBM blades. And in doing so,
(performance, memory, I/O) and on the
we have significantly improved their performance and stability while
most appropriate processor architecture
for the task. hugely reducing our operational costs.”
Managed in the Cloud
Altares now has two IBM BladeCenter H chassis with a total of 12
• On its journey to a full private cloud,
Altares has deployed a heterogeneous single-socket HS21 blades, and 12 2-socket HS22 blades. The VMware
technology platform controlled with a virtual servers boot from the SAN, and all operating system images
single set of integrated management are replicated between the two sites to provide resilience and rapid
tools. Administrators can orchestrate
recovery in the event of a disaster at one site. The company also
existing virtual servers or create new
ones to meet new requirements without uses an IBM Power 570 server with IBM POWER6 processors. The
needing to think about the underlying Power 570 hosts business applications running virtualized on IBM i.
physical resources.
Driving Innovation To minimize disruption during the initial deployment, Altares engaged
• By providing a resilient and flexible IBM Global Technology Services – Integrated Technology Services to
platform for the creation of new handle the migration from the old data center and the set-up of the new
information systems, the IBM
BladeCenter solution at Altares is
BladeCenter environment. “The IBM team was able to perform the
helping the company respond to new move quickly, minimizing downtime and allowing Altares to continue
opportunities for revenue generation. By with its daily operations,” says Christophe le Caignec.
orchestrating existing virtual resources,
the company can deliver new services
to clients rapidly and at low incremental The new infrastructure runs virtualized Microsoft® Windows® and
cost. Linux servers on the Intel® processor based hardware (HS21, HS22), as
well as IBM i servers on the IBM Power architecture.
Cutting down on IT costs
Moving to the new IBM infrastructure delivered immediate tangible
cost benefits for Altares. Instead of 175 standalone physical servers,
the company now has just 24 servers to power, cool and manage. The
new solution takes up just 33 percent of the floor space occupied by the
legacy solution, translating directly into significant savings.
As well as cutting ongoing operational costs, the consolidated server
infrastructure has far lower capital costs than the previous landscape
– so Altares will spend considerably less than it used to each time it
refreshes its hardware. Equally, as the company expands its services
and reaches out to new clients, it will no longer need to invest in a new
standalone server for each new requirement. Instead, it will simply
fire up new virtual machines on the existing hardware – and any new
physical servers it deploys will potentially run dozens of different
applications rather than just one.
“The virtualized IBM infrastructure enables us to do more with less:
using a small set of physical resources to provide a large set of virtual
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services to the business,” comments Christophe le Caignec. “The
solution has also brought operational benefits to our internal teams,
Solution Components
who can now carry out maintenance work during the day without
Software disrupting business services. This is possible because live virtual
• IBM® Tivoli® Storage Manager servers can be moved from one physical machine to another with no
• IBM InfoSphere® Optim™
• VMware Infrastructure Enterprise
downtime.”
• VMware Virtual Center
• VMware View The high performance and reliability of IBM BladeCenter enable
• VMware Site Recovery Manager Altares to analyze and report on vast amounts of company data. IBM
Servers Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus provides a supervision layer, which helps
• IBM BladeCenter® H chassis the company meet demanding SLAs with major clients such as large
• IBM BladeCenter HS21 banks, insurance companies and government bodies. And with fewer,
• IBM BladeCenter HS22
• IBM Power® 570
more reliable servers to manage, the IT team has seen a sharp drop in
the number of service incidents, freeing up skilled technicians to work
IBM Business Partner on other value-add activities. Altares also uses IBM InfoSphere Optim
• Overlap
technology to simplify and accelerate the management of data, and in
particular to refresh test and development environments.
“The virtualized IBM Thanks to VMware virtualization on IBM BladeCenter, Altares
can choose precisely the right platform to serve each new business
infrastructure enables us requirement. “The solution gives us all the advantages of a
to do more with less: using heterogeneous infrastructure, but with the same simple management
a small set of physical that we would have for a homogeneous infrastructure,” comments
Christophe le Caignec. “We can create virtual server templates that are
resources to provide optimized to meet different kinds of requirements, then rapidly deploy
a large set of virtual new systems based on these as soon as the business needs them. The
services to the business.” ability to provision new test and development landscapes on demand
and at practically zero incremental cost helps us support major new
— Christophe Le Caignec, IT Director, Altares
business projects.”
Using the built-in BladeCenter management software together with
VMware tools, Altares can control the entire landscape of virtual
servers in an intuitive manner, without needing to worry about the
underlying complexity. New virtual machines can be created within
minutes, and existing services can be orchestrated to meet emerging
business opportunities at very high speed.
“Our positive experience so far with the IBM solution has made
us keen to push further,” says Christophe Le Caignec. “We are
currently working on new business continuity initiatives for our
critical applications. These will take advantage of virtualized servers
and replicated storage to enable extremely rapid recovery. In the near
future, the solution will evolve into a true private cloud, serving both
internal needs and the needs of clients.”
For more information
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help you integrate, automate, protect and transform your IT, contact
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