ACTIVE Network Adopts VMware's Unified Platform to Improve IT Automation and Data Center Security

VMware, Inc.

, the global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, today announced that ACTIVE Network® is transforming its IT operations to match the speed of business with VMware's unified platform. With a VMware powered cloud environment, ACTIVE is able to accelerate time to revenue, improve operational efficiency, manage spikes in demand for IT resources and reduce overall risk. "ACTIVE Network is focused on technology that drives more efficient designs while applying security at the core of the infrastructure, providing our development teams with the most flexible architecture for deploying our applications," said Greg Ingino, CIO, ACTIVE Network. "VMware's unified platform for the cloud has enabled our organization in the development of its own private cloud infrastructure by leveraging software-defined networking to deliver on our vision of a service oriented architecture that delivers technology on a secure internal platform. The VMware unified platform has led to more effective deployment of resources leading to reduced costs and increased revenue through more rapid delivery." Automating DevOps with VMware's Unified Cloud Platform ACTIVE Network is a leader in Activity and Participant Management™ and data solutions, powering more 55,000 customers with SaaS technology that streamlines activity and event administration. According to the company, the ability to provision on-demand services and applications for developers, and other business users, is important to the organization's success. As a cloud-based services company, ACTIVE needs to automate as many elements in its IT operations as possible to better serve its customers. The automation also needs to help optimize the utilization of the company's current infrastructure and improve return on capital. Using VMware vRealize™ Automation™, ACTIVE Network IT is reclaiming inactive resources and reusing them to increase IT efficiency and savings. Today, operations teams are driving platform deployments through desired state documentation and testing against the vRealize™ Orchestrator™ API. This allows for a fluid and flexible provisioning mechanism that is moving applications towards elasticity. The IT staff is also building a self-service catalog for automated delivery of IT services to its developers with VMware vRealize Automation. Developers also have access to blueprints that streamline the design of applications or new development environments. Through the integration of VMware vRealize Automation and VMware NSX™, developers can automate the provisioning of full applications, or test and dev environments, complete with all of the required networking and security serviced provided by VMware NSX. Virtualizing the network with NSX, and automating the provisioning of services helps reduce the risk of human error in the process, and is helping ACTIVE's IT team to significantly reduce application deployment. "The largest bottleneck for our developers has been getting networking created to support new instances of applications, and then getting security applied to permit the right things to talk to each other for the instance to be usable," said Tommy McNicholas, manager of global IT Operations at ACTIVE Network. "We developed our own security model that VMware vRealize Automation could adhere to and then security policy was just automatically applied to any new instance via NSX. With this approach we're taking our deployment times down from as much as 10 weeks to as little as a few minutes (1)." With VMware NSX deployed in production, ACTIVE Network is also improving data center security. VMware NSX helps to secure ACTIVE's multi-tenant environment using isolation and micro-segmentation, designed to restrict registrants from viewing information from another customer's site. VMware NSX offers ACTIVE Network several advantages over traditional network security approaches, including automated move/add/change for workloads, distributed policy enforcement at every virtual interface and in-kernel, scale-out firewalling distributed to every hypervisor and baked into the platform. "Our development environment suffered from high infrastructure costs because developers would skip the step of tearing down environments for fear they would not be able to access them again when needed," said Nate Motyl, vice president of global technology operations, ACTIVE Network. "The extra environments causes significant sprawl in their (very expensive) physical infrastructure and a lack of visibility into actual utilization sometimes leading to incremental and redundant purchases. VMware technology is helping us eliminate inefficiencies, better utilize the resources we've purchased and relieve spikes in demand through a cloud approach. Using this new SDI strategy, we decrease our build time by an order of magnitude, enhance our build quality assurance, and do so with a lower resource commit." Additional Resource Learn more about VMware vRealize Automation Learn more about VMware vRealize Orchestrator Learn more about the VMware NSX network virtualization platform Learn how to #VirtualizeYourNetwork