Cimex Media UK began revolutionizing digital media solutions more than a decade ago—winning two BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards, a Royal Television Society Award, and over thirty other honors to date. Primarily a website design and development firm, they focus on interactive digital media projects which aim to enhance an organization’s particular brand through websites other digital media. Although much of their work is creative, they invariably delve into strategy and branding in order to take their clients from initial concept through the implementation process.
With 60 plus employees, Cimex serves both private and government sectors, having done some of their most well-known work on interactive learning projects for the BBC and Channel 4 in Europe. As Cimex moves more into government web-based projects, it hopes to expand not only its customerbase, but its data center infrastructure.
Cimex uses a co-locational data center which houses 14 servers for web hosting, but the company also has 12 servers in-house for R&D purposes. Ninety percent of their servers are Dell, with the remaining HP. Peter Murray, systems manager at Cimex says the company initially became interested in virtualization because developers needed to test website prototypes using dummy server environments given to them by clients; however, in order to deploy multiple test sites, Cimex needed to be able to efficiently deploy multiple servers.
Murray found out about XenServer through reading a few media articles, but at that time the company had not yet begun distributing a commercial offering, so Cimex tested VMware ESX. “It was a bit out of our price range and we thought that integrating it for our purposes would be quite tricky.” said Murray. “When we were offered the XenServer Enterprise Edition beta last year, we tested it to, and found it to offer all the features that we needed at a price point that was less than 50% of competitive products.”
Cimex began testing the Linux beta version of XenServer in October of 2006, and deployed the Windows version in mid-November. Currently, Cimex has 15 to 20 virtual machines in-house for research and development. Although a few developers have VMware on their local machines for testing certain projects, Murray explained that “for speed and reliability testing we like using Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition.”
The initial savings that Cimex has experienced with Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition has come as a result of a reduction in the number of servers needed for any given project. “For the BBC, we only had to buy two servers rather than ten, that’s a large savings for us,” stated Murray.
In addition to consolidation, virtualization has also streamlined server deployment and cut down on the number of staff members needed for any given task. “We’re able to clone instances in thirty to forty minutes rather than doing a full install from scratch which takes a few hours and requires me or someone from my team to help,” noted Murray. “Virtualization enables the developers to clone instances on their own, and has made us much more efficient.”
Most importantly, XenServer Enterprise Edition speeds development and allows more time for QA—a huge benefit to a company that has made a name for itself by creating easy-to-use, welldesigned websites. Murray also cites easier server management as a main benefit enabled by virtualization. “It’s really nice just to use the XenServer console,” said Murray. “You can quickly see if any machine is short of RAM or short of disk space. I found that to be a massive help—especially if I’m working remotely.”
Overall, Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition has made the Cimex data center more resilient and offered more flexibility to their development environment. “We can give end-developers limited access to each of those boxes and they’re quite happy working on them as if they’re physical servers,” concluded Murray. “That was the initial goal, and it’s worked out remarkably well.”
As the company expands and brings on more clients, Cimex wants to grow their server population by thirty percent each year. They also plan to adopt an iSCSI backbone and begin researching and planning for disaster recovery solutions. For now, Cimex is pleased with its virtualization results and looks forward to future releases of XenServer.
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