It starts with establishing a culture that supports rapid growth and continuous improvement. “We see ourselves as an early-stage startup within IBM®,” explains Jason Erickson, Senior Technology Zone Manager, Automation, at IBM.

IBM Technology Zone (TechZone) is the single destination for all of IBM’s go-to-market teams and the IBM Business Partner ecosystem to provision and customize live demo environments. Within a few clicks, someone can access a wide variety of infrastructures and software solutions.

“A Tech Seller will log in to TechZone to spin up an instance of one product (for example, IBM Cloud Pak for Data) running on public cloud while at the same time a Business Partner is logging in to spin up an instance of another product (for example, IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation) running on premises. Multiply that by 500. This is what’s going on in TechZone every single day,” explains Erickson. These demo environments allow users to get direct experience with a new product and better understand how it can be implemented in their own environment and have an impact on their business. Because they’re intended for education and exploration, these environments are ephemeral. They last anywhere from a matter of hours to a matter of days.

“For the last few years, we’ve been dramatically expanding our operations and acquiring new users across IBM and our Business Partner ecosystem,” notes Erickson. “This has required us to quickly and safely build out an infrastructure to support their environments.” This is why TechZone turned to IBM Turbonomic®.

TechZone’s IT environment is extremely complex, and it’s in a state of continuous change. On average, the team manages 2,600 virtual machines (VMs) in the public cloud, 14,000 VMs on premises and 274,000 containers distributed across 600 clusters, which include 178,000 pods.

“We start off the week with 12,000 VMs running and by the end of the week we’ll have 16,000 VMs distributed across a hybrid cloud environment that includes Azure, AWS, Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes and VMware,” explains Erickson. “We go through this cycle of fluctuating demand every single week. Before we had Turbonomic, we didn’t have a single source of truth that could reliably show us how many VMs we had running across our environment. We would have to log in to six or seven different interfaces and manually piece together data. Now we have a consolidated view of our entire environment (from the application layer down to the infrastructure) that’s updated in real time.”

Full-stack visibility is a critical first step in TechZone’s journey of reducing cost, but it’s only the beginning. A team of high-performing individuals cannot manually review and establish the optimal resource allocation for an environment of this scale. They need an AI and analytics engine that continuously reviews their environment to identify and act on opportunities to improve resource allocation. “We don’t create everything that gets deployed on TechZone. We allow the IBM community to create patterns that run on our environment. Our team of nine can’t manually inspect every one of them. This is where Turbonomic’s AI can help,” says Erickson.

The TechZone team began their optimization efforts by focusing on their Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware environments, as well as Red Hat® OpenShift® (link resides outside of ibm.com). They started with reviewing and manually executing Turbonomic’s AI-powered resourcing recommendations. “There were many non-disruptive actions that could be immediately implemented in AWS, for example. We took a lot of actions to improve performance of storage and reduce cost at the same time,” recalls Erickson. The team closely monitored the impact of its resourcing changes and continued to optimize as time went on. As trust in the recommendations grew, the team began to implement automation.

Presently, the team is automating all AWS volume scaling actions and container pod move actions, as well as resize up actions for VMs across all environments and resize down actions for VMs in their test environment. In the first four months of automating actions to reduce risk and assure performance, Turbonomic executed over 175,000 automated resourcing actions across their on-premises environment and over 19,000 automated resourcing actions across AWS. During that time, the TechZone team achieved USD 619,000 savings across their public cloud environment.

An optimization journey of this scale wouldn’t have been possible without intelligent automation. An environment such as TechZone’s simply can’t be optimized through manual intervention alone. Once they built a full-stack view of their entire environment and began exploring Turbonomic’s AI-powered resourcing recommendations, the TechZone team could safely improve the efficiency of their environment, while continuing to deliver an excellent end-user experience.

As they move forward, the team plans to expand their adoption of automation. “We’re seeing clear results through these initial use cases. In terms of what’s next, we’re going to explore which actions we can take more automatically in Turbonomic,” explains Erickson.

TechZone provides technical “show me” content and environments together in one place. Users of TechZone can find and reserve a wide range of live environments across infrastructures and platforms with only a few clicks.