Cycle & Carriage Industries streamlines enterprise cloud infrastructure with Microsoft platform

 |   Singapore News Center

SINGAPORE, October 29, 2013 – Microsoft has announced that Cycle & Carriage Industries (C&C), one of the premier automotive groups in Singapore, is the pioneer adopter for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and the Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 suite, both of which are launched today in Asia Pacific. C&C, a member of Singapore-listed Jardine Cycle & Carriage, has seen enhanced productivity, corporate compliance and control with the adoption of new enterprise cloud infrastructure from Microsoft, with improvements of up to 20% in some areas.

C&C, a household name in Singapore as the local distributor for some of the world’s leading car marques, including Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Kia and Citroën, decided this year to improve server and datacentre performance through consolidating its existing VMWare and Citrix virtual environments and introducing a comprehensive management tool that could monitor and manage its server and datacentre operations more effectively.

In the first half of 2013, C&C migrated its virtual machine (VM) workloads onto a mixture of new VMware vSphere hosts and Microsoft Hyper-V hosts. Its Citrix XenServer, hosting XenApp VMs, also received the same treatment. C&C deployed Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 and components of Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 suite to give it an edge in system management for the cloud.

As a result, C&C has seen better productivity and performance in the cloud. Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 has provided C&C with new in-depth visibility into its cloud infrastructure. The company can now monitor its datacenter end-to-end, with single-pane-of-glass management for VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V infrastructure, and receive proactive alerts and reports on server performance, allowing potential problems to be identified before they escalate. The hours spent on server administration have been cut by 20% through such streamlining.

“Our team is able to manage servers (both physical and virtual) across roles remotely from a single user interface. We can also track, report and assess the amount of resources used per IP address or VM,” said Jimmy Lim, IT Manager, C&C.

Resource utilization has also improved through the implementation of server virtualization using Microsoft Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2, while datacentre service delivery has been optimized through deployment of high availability (HA) servers, cluster-level rebalancing and intelligent power management.

“Windows Server 2012 R2 offers excellent economics by integrating a multi-server platform on industry-standard hardware. As a result, we have achieved our target of substantially increasing our virtual machine density,” said Raymond Johnsun, Chief Information Officer of C&C. “We have packed 15% more VM workloads onto each physical server after implementing Hyper-V, while the storage management features in Windows Server 2012 R2 reduced the need for new storage by 10%.”

These benefits have encouraged C&C to include Windows 2012 R2 with Hyper-V and System Center 2012 R2 as part of its roadmap to consolidate its virtual server infrastructure onto a single virtualization platform and deploy complete, integrated management tools. In addition, the major advantage of adopting the Hyper-V virtualization platform is that C&C is now well placed to deploy hybrid cloud scenarios where workloads can seamlessly move between on-premise and the Windows Azure public cloud.

“We have made great progress in productivity, corporate compliance and control, while effectively managing our physical, virtual and mobile client environments,” concluded Johnsun. “We will not only have a complete platform for building our own datacentre and private cloud, but also estimate that we can save 3% on future infrastructure spend as a result of the Microsoft deployment.”

Arun Ulag, General Manager, Cloud & Enterprise Division, Microsoft Asia Pacific said, “We have a unique perspective into the enterprise cloud as the only cloud provider delivering best-in-class first-party software-as-a-service applications, a global public cloud platform, as well as a hybrid approach that spans infrastructure, application development, data platform and device management. As a company living and learning at cloud scale, and engineering on cloud time, we’re here to help enterprises in Asia Pacific like Cycle & Carriage Industries realize the promise of the cloud.”

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