* Making the most of new traffic management gear spurred Ceridian to revamp its IT structure
When I write about a new technology implementation, it’s easy to focus on the products rather than the staffing and operational resources that go into a project. In reality, it’s the proper combination of technology and manpower that makes a rollout successful.
At Ceridian, coordination among different IT groups and changes to the reporting structure enabled the human resources specialist to adopt a new business model. The Minneapolis-based software maker over the last several years has shifted from solely selling shrink-wrapped versions of its HR applications to offering hosted services for applications such as payroll, time and attendance, and labor management.
The need to create network-ready applications that are delivered over the Internet, rather than deployed at customer sites, raised new IT considerations for Ceridian. When customers were responsible for the software, they dealt with issues such as network capacity, performance and data management. When Ceridian adopted a hosted model, those issues became more critical internally. “We went from that being on the customer side of the equation to it being on our side of the equation,” says Rodney Bowers, director of data center services at Ceridian.
To ensure solid application performance, Ceridian implemented 3400 series Big-IP appliances from F5 Networks. The F5 gear today handles load balancing among more than 1,900 servers at Ceridian’s data centers as well as authentication of SSL traffic.
One of the advantages of using the Big-IP appliances is that it freed development staff — who were under pressure to prepare the hosted offerings for launching — from having to address traffic management and SSL authentication on their own, Bowers says.
“We could take and aggregate TCP/IP sessions, also do the SSL acceleration, and offload that from the application,” he says. “To be able to use hardware to offload those two important components was a very beneficial find for us.”
At the same time it was deploying the F5 gear, Ceridian tweaked its IT structure to better address the challenges of delivering applications to customers over the Internet. Shifting to an application service provider (ASP) mode was an effort that crossed network, application development, storage, and customer support disciplines, and getting it right required better coordination among these distinct departments, Bowers says.
“The groups were truly siloed. The network guys didn’t talk to the storage guys, the storage guys didn’t talk to the application guys,” he recalls. “We had to get people understanding the other groups’ problems.”
For example, it was important for network staff to work closely with field service staff who were charged with helping Ceridian customers prepare their own internal networks for the hosted applications. Likewise, application development teams paired with data center specialists to design distinct Web and database application tiers to better isolate and monitor application performance issues.
Ceridian also needed to address how the new delivery model would impact storage requirements, which meant getting the network and storage teams to work together. “We tuned our storage requirements, we tuned our clustering configuration working with our SAN infrastructure, and then we worked on replication between the two data centers,” Bowers says.
In breaking down the organizational barriers that existed between the IT factions, Bowers wound up taking on greater responsibility. He used to oversee the network teams; today Bowers oversees an operations team that encompasses network, storage and data center groups. In the next newsletter I’ll share some of Bowers’ tips for making such a transition go smoothly.
