Case Study
Social Media Software Firm
Looks for Low-Cost SaaS
Jive achieves performance and cost goals
with SaaS offering built on Cisco private cloud.
Service profiles have been key to us continuing to expand and
having consistency throughout the environment. When you get to
an environment of our size, where we have over 800 blades and
over 30,000 virtual machines, consistency is key, and having
automation around that is the only way we were able to scale.
-- Justin Fitzhugh, Chief Information Officer, Jive
Customer Profile Summary
Size: 650+ employees
Location: Palo Alto, California
Industry: Delivering Enterprise-Grade
Communication and Collaboration Software
In a fast-paced world where brilliant ideas can come from anyone,
anywhere, at any time, Jive’s vision is to help organizations connect
people, information, insights, opinions, and creativity—to create a
collective sense of direction and community. To realize this vision—and
increase its margins—Jive needed a low-cost software-as-a-service
(SaaS) infrastructure that could keep pace with customer posts,
forums, streams, and likes
.
Challenges
ȤDeliver 100 percent availability
and deterministic performance
Ȥ3URYLGHHQWHUSULVHJUDGHVHFXULW\
Ȥ6FDle to meet demands of
global business growth
Delivering 100 Percent Availability and Deterministic Performance
Jive customers expect 100 percent uptime and deterministic
performance. In the call centers of leading telecommunications
providers, the JiveX external community platform serves as a
foundation for mission-critical customer support. Global media
networks depend on seamless collaboration and communication
enabled by Jive to deliver timely news in today’s “always on”
environment. These examples highlight the strategic nature of
enterprise social business where outages or unacceptable latencies
can directly impact performance.
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
Scaling Globally
Because Jive’s customers span the globe, the company needed to
scale coverage to multiple data centers, thereby bringing 100 percent
availability, reliable performance, and processing power to remote
customers.
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Security is of paramount importance to Jive and its customers. Jive
hosts its customers’ data, including how they operate on a daily basis.
In addition, Jive often hosts external-facing communities, displaying its
customers’ public face to their customers. Clearly, data breaches
would be a detriment.
Building an Integrated Technology Stack
Jive’s operations staff needed the flexibility to build an underlying
hardware platform in concert with the company’s software
development efforts. Marrying software development to
infrastructure—by owning and operating the entire technology
stack—would allow Jive to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Demonstrating Customer Commitment
The Jive team also wanted to demonstrate that SaaS was a
fundamental business offering. The company believed that its
technology stack and ability to conduct operations with a skilled staff
would demonstrate its commitment to SaaS customers.
Reducing Total Cost of Ownership
Ultimately, Jive needed to reduce overall costs, improve margins,
increase profitability. It was also important for the company to leverage
economies of scale as it continued to grow its customer base and
infrastructure footprint.
Solution
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private cloud built on Cisco, NetApp,
and VMware technology
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multiple data centers worldwide
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Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS)
Service Profiles and management ease with
Cisco UCS Unified Fabric and UCS Manager
Migrating to Private Clouds in Data Centers Worldwide
Jive began running in a single data center with a managed service
provider. However, the company’s growth demanded more flexibility
than the provider could deliver. As a result, Jive decided to operate its
own private cloud infrastructure. The company chose Cisco Unified
Computing System™ (UCS®) as the underlying computing and
management component. Today, Jive runs private in leased data center
space in Phoenix, New Jersey, Amsterdam, and London.
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
Partnering with VMware, NetApp, and Blue Chip Technologies
The Jive technology platform builds on Cisco® UCS but involves other
partners as well. VMware provides the hardware abstraction layer, and
NetApp provides storage. Both allow Jive to deliver a scalable
environment that responds to customer demands. This ability is
especially important because Jive has thousands of SaaS customers.
In addition, value-added reseller Blue Chip Technologies has
been—and continues to be—instrumental in facilitating many of the
logistical and planning details around deployment and production of
the technology stack.
Provisioning Rapidly with Cisco UCS Service Profiles
Today, Jive runs an environment of more than 800 blade servers and
30,000 virtual machines. Cisco UCS Service Profiles have been key
to Jive’s ability to expand and to maintain consistency across its
environment. These powerful profiles allow the company to deploy
and manage its hardware in a unified way, accomplishing scale
through automation.
By combining Cisco UCS Service Profiles with VMware vSphere, Jive
can manage different customer profiles at the virtual level—enabling
maximum flexibility in moving customers across infrastructure to meet
varying workload requirements. Flexibility is also accomplished by
assigning these servers to a pool of computing resources, rather than
hard-wiring specific servers for specific purposes.
Managing Easily with Cisco UCS Unified Fabric and UCS Manager
In addition, Cisco UCS Unified Fabric allows Jive to deploy solutions
once in remote locations and reconfigure, manage, and rearchitect
then as needed. Servers are reallocated as needed, and if hardware
must be replaced, Jive can easily reassign virtual machines and
associated customer profiles. This capability is especially valuable in
remote data centers where Jive does not have local personnel.
Though Jive’s production environment include more than 800 blades
in multiple data centers worldwide, the company has assigned only
one full-time staff member to manage this infrastructure. Jive is able
to do this by using Cisco UCS Manager, which provides a consolidated view of alarms and alerts as well as activity types that require
monitoring.
Expanding Memory Footprint
A key component in enabling Jive to achieve the performance that its
customers demand is the expanded memory footprint available in
Cisco UCS blades. The Jive application is memory-focused, and this
expanded footprint provides the agility needed to move the application within the environment.
The expanded Cisco UCS memory footprint, coupled with the
advanced manageability provided by the Cisco UCS platform, also
helps reduce costs. The operations team has the flexibility to run
more virtual machines per server, thereby reducing the number of
deployed blades. And fewer deployed blades also translate into fewer
VMware licenses.
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
We found Cisco to be a great partner around developing overall
technology stacks and platforms as we look forward, and helping
us develop overall solutions that scale with our business and
meet the cost demands, and cost reductions that we need
to have.
-- Justin Fitzhugh, Chief Information Officer, Jive
Results
ȤProvisioned and managed more than 800
UCS blades and 30,000+ virtual machines in
four data centers worldwide with support of
only oQHIXOOWLPHVWDɮPHPEHU
Ȥ(OLPLQDWed customer experience issues
related to outages, poor performance, or
security breaches
Ȥ5educed total cost of ownership and
increased bottom line through moving to
private cloud based on Cisco technology.
Creating Optimal User Experience
Ultimately, it is the customer experience that matters. Outages,
intolerable latencies, or security breaches not only tarnish Jive’s brand
but can also translate directly into lost customers—now and in the
future.
A key benefit of Jive’s private cloud infrastructure is added security
for customer data. Jive staff members carefully manage access to
every aspect of the technology stack. The level of security thus
provided is impossible in public, shared environment.
In addition, by running a private cloud solution built on Cisco, VMware,
and NetApp, Jive offers a very high standard of performance and
availability. By running the entire technology stack on its private cloud
and leveraging Cisco UCS ease of management, Jive can deliver
deterministic, reliable performance that is simply unavailable in a
shared environment.
Enjoying Global Support
By deploying a private cloud solution built on Cisco, VMware, and
NetApp technologies, Jive benefits not only from deploying a
thoroughly tested solution but also from the close, worldwide relationship of these industry leaders. If issues arise, Jive has a single
number to call, which is especially important because its operations
are distributed around the globe.
Reducing Costs
From a TCO perspective, Jive fares much better owning and operating its own cloud infrastructure, rather than renting public space.
Since deploying a private cloud solution, Jive has significantly reduced
costs and increased margin. As the company brings more customers
onboard and provisions additional supporting infrastructure, it experiences economies of scale that are not possible with a rented public
cloud model.
© 2014 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public.
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Case Study
For More Information
To find out more about ISVs deploying their software as a service on
Cisco-based clouds, go here.
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