Betfair puts its money on VMware's stack ahead of Cisco's UCS

Betfair's CIO tells Computing that the firm would have bet differently if they went through the VMware transition again

Eighteen months ago, online gambling website Betfair decided to go with VMware's stack over Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System) as it was the most "mature off-the-shelf product on the market at the time", according to Betfair CIO Michael Bischoff.

In an interview with Computing, Bischoff explained that the firm decided to invest in "automation and orchestration", describing that as the "sweet spot".

"We invested in this model because I was grumpy about having to buy any more tin [kit]," he joked.

"To purchase additional x86 servers or networking or storage from any vendor was the wrong way of looking at it."

Instead, the firm focused its investment in manpower and licensing around automation and orchestration - two terms that he repeats often. This has enabled Betfair to deploy its workloads wherever it sees fit; from a private cloud to a hybrid public cloud.

"We haven't invested in massive server platforms or storage capabilities because we anticipated that this was coming," he said. "We have obsessed about orchestration and we did that because we believe this is the secret sauce to making this work; we didn't know at the time that VMware would be releasing [the vCloud Hybrid Service] but we knew we needed the ability to control those workloads and we also wanted to support our regulators by telling them where the data is."

But for Betfair, this wasn't about saving money, but agility.

"Many organisations confuse costs and agility of the public cloud," said Bischoff. "We wanted to address a particular need, which was to support our development arm to develop, test and deploy software as soon as possible - that was the business case. It was about agility and the ability to move incredibly quickly while maintaining a level of control, governance and compliance."

After selecting VMware, Betfair's IT team worked alongside its development team to understand what its use case requirements were; specifically, how it wanted to be able to use Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

"We picked up a few different use cases which we delivered pretty quickly but then what became apparent to us was that it wasn't just about IaaS; that's the easy bit," said Bischoff. "It was about deploying apps, databases, data and that's where we've spent most of our time in blueprinting the estate using [VMware cloud management tool] vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), and that's really where we see the power: one-click-ability to deploy entire working environments - not just infrastructure - all the way through to applications."

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Betfair puts its money on VMware's stack ahead of Cisco's UCS

Betfair's CIO tells Computing that the firm would have bet differently if they went through the VMware transition again

This has now been extended using VMware's latest vCloud Hybrid Service solution as part of the beta programme, meaning that an API deployment for Betfair can now be deployed "inside my datacentre or not, without any additional effort", according to Bischoff.

He urges other end users to not underestimate the complexity of blueprinting their existing application estates, and said that in hindsight, the firm would have involved the development community more in the blueprinting process.

But he added: "The technology is the easy part. If I had to do it again, I would spend 90 per cent more time worrying about people and processes, and 90 per cent less time worrying about the technology."

Indeed, the firm had to alter its strategy soon after it selected VMware's stack because its systems integrator 2e2, went bust. It completed the majority of the work in-house, with the help of VMware.

Bischoff added that he found it tough to recruit personnel with the required skillset, but did manage to find some new technical staff, and trained up other staff to fill the gap.

"We've grown our own staff into these roles and we've moved people from adjacencies like storage, compute and networking into this space because they have the understanding of our environment and we've augmented those with some skills from the market as well," Bischoff said.

As for the future, Bischoff said Betfair will continue to blueprint its applications, and put its workloads "in the right place".

"We operate in a business which has a workload requirement which goes up and down, and our ability to automate that and align consumption to capacity is an area that we will have to work on, because that is a relatively immature space," he said.

But while Bischoff said he hopes "to never buy a server again", he acknowledges that Betfair is not going to get rid of all physical infrastructures. He does, however, believe the company will continue to go through a major cultural shift.

"The opportunity that presents itself is that our staff are investing more time and effort on the importance of things like orchestration and automation and in working much more closely with our development colleagues and less time on physical infrastructure," he said.

"Everyone realises that it is underway, and people are realising this is how you operate. It has an impact on how departments are going to be run now and in the future."