France Telecom is virtualizing servers using VMware on HP BladeSystems to consolidate 17 data centers into two more efficient centers. This is projected to save 22 million euros over three years through reduced power, maintenance, tax, and space costs. Virtualization has increased server utilization 10-fold from 5% to 50-70%, reduced servers by 50%, cut time to deploy new servers from 4 weeks to hours, and improved disaster recovery from weeks to a maximum of 4 hours.

1. France Telecom and HP:
“Together, we can do more”
Virtualization on the HP BladeSystem is contributing to a projected
three-year savings of 22 million euros.
“Add together the savings in power, business taxes, maintenance costs,
and data center space that we don’t have to build, and we project a total
savings of 22 million euros over the next three years.”
—Loïc Renaudon, program director, France Telecom
HP customer case
study: Consolidation
and virtualization;
green technology
Industry:
Telecommunications
On a few things almost everyone can agree: change
is accelerating. The world keeps getting smaller.
Boundaries are disappearing and cultures are mixing.
As the world’s resources diminish, its climate is
changing. Everyone is more interdependent.
France Telecom is in a good position to witness
these changes. It serves 174 million customers on
five continents, and its Orange brand is among the
50 most recognized brands in the world. Its new
global ad campaign theme is “Together we can do
more” (www.orange.com/togetherwecandomore)—
emphasizing that only by working together and
building on each other’s strengths can we succeed on
a small, environmentally stressed planet.
Behind the scenes, France Telecom is transforming
itself with a three-year program so that it can deliver
the services people want and need. The program is
called NExT (New Experience in Telecommunications).
Launched in 2005, it combined the company’s
Internet, television, and mobile services under
the Orange brand. NExT is also about fostering
innovations in new and converged services, such as
IP TV (Internet-based television).
As part of NExT, France Telecom is committed to
sustainable development. The company wants to
reduce the environmental impact of its operations
and products.
Objective
Transform 17 data centers into two green, highly
efficient ones to support growth
Approach
One key component: to consolidate and virtualize
servers using VMware and the HP BladeSystem
Business outcomes
Projected 22 million euros (27 million U.S.•
dollars) in total savings over three years
Hundredfold faster time to market (servers•
deployed in hours vs. four weeks)
IT improvements
Tenfold increase in server utilization (50% to•
70% vs. 5%)
Number of servers reduced by 50%—•
approximately 10,000 servers eliminated
17 data centers to be consolidated into two•
Disaster recovery in four hours maximum instead•
of weeks for key applications
Spikes in demand accommodated dynamically•
without buying added hardware

2. IT is at the core of broad gains
France Telecom’s IT team is playing a major role in the
company’s transformation. As part of NExT, the team
plans to consolidate 17 existing data centers into two
new and more efficient ones. This IT initiative is called
“Eco Center”—a name chosen to remind everyone that
saving the environment also saves money. Driving the
Eco Center are five key objectives—support growth yet
use less power and space, gain greater flexibility, get
services to market faster, improve performance, and
enhance disaster recovery.
The benefits of the transformation are already
substantial. The 20,000 servers that power the
company are being consolidated and will be reduced
by about half through virtualization.
To save space, the IT team decided to standardize
and consolidate on server blades. In 2006, it
evaluated blade offerings from vendors such as Dell,
IBM, Fujitsu, and HP. “We wanted the most efficient
server blade enclosure, and it came down to HP and
IBM,” says Loïc Renaudon, program director at France
Telecom. “We’ve decided to get our servers from both
vendors.”
The team chose VMware for its virtualization software
and is recently evaluating Citrix XenServer. “We
want to double source our software as well,”
Renaudon notes.
In the past 18 months, the team has created 5,750
virtual machines and has the goal of increasing that
number to at least 7,500 by the end of 2009. The
details of virtualization vary for each operating
system platform:
Ninety percent of the company’s servers run on•
Microsoft Windows Server or Red Hat Enterprise
Linux. These are being virtualized at 20 VMs
per host.
Applications running on IBM AIX are being•
virtualized using Micro-Partitioning.
HP-UX–based applications were running on•
PA-RISC–based servers. They’ll be virtualized
on Itanium®
-based HP Integrity BL860c server
blades running software that simulates the PA-RISC
processors. There will be six virtual servers per host.
SPARC-based applications on Solaris 8 or 9 will be•
upgraded to Solaris 10. Along with Solaris 10 x86
applications, they’ll be virtualized using Solaris 10
Containers. Fifteen virtual servers will be hosted on
each blade server.
“In case of disaster, we will be able to
fail-over gold and silver applications from
the HP BladeSystem at one site to the
BladeSystem at the other site in minutes. That
compares with weeks to recover from tape.
We are just starting this pilot.”
—Loïc Renaudon, program director,
France Telecom
2

3. Tenfold gain in efficiency
One gain from virtualization is that server utilization
is projected to be 10 times higher. “Our rack-mounted
servers were only about five percent utilized,”
Renaudon observes. “Our server blades that host
VMs have a target utilization of between 50 and 70
percent. The real bottleneck is the lack of memory.”
As the virtualization continues, power and space
savings are already significant. In the course of
studying which servers to virtualize, for instance, the
IT team found 950 physical servers that no longer had
any users. These were decommissioned, saving power.
While the location of the two new data centers
is still being determined, one requirement is that
for redundancy, each data center must have two
independent channels of electrical power, generated
from nuclear sources.
To further save on power consumption, each data
center needs to be located where it can be cooled
by outside air. Orange has a patented optimized
ventilation solution that harnesses thermal inertia to
make use of cooler night-time temperatures for climate
control purposes in buildings, thus cutting down on
the use of cold production systems that emit coolant
gases. Energy consumption is about one-sixth of what
it would be with a classic air conditioning system.1
1. Orange Commitment on Protection of the Environment. Press Kit.
Orange.com. Visited 10/27/08.
Hundredfold faster time to market
Besides being greener, services at France Telecom
are now launched faster. “We can deploy a new
VM in several hours on HP server blades,” Renaudon
observes. “It took us four weeks to deploy a rack-
mounted server. We’re much faster to market.”
Teams were reluctant to give up a server before—
even if it had been needed for just a temporary
project—because it had taken so long to get. “Now
a server is easy to deploy, decommission, and bring
back because we have procedures for archiving its
image when it’s no longer needed,” Renaudon says.
“Everyone is more efficient.”
It’s also easier, thanks to VMware’s VMotion, to move
servers between data centers. “We’ve already moved
400 servers between our locations,” Renaudon says.
“We can more easily adapt our current data centers
until we build the two new ones.”
“We can deploy a new VM in several hours on HP
server blades. It took us four weeks to deploy a rack-
mounted server. We’re much faster to market.”
—Loïc Renaudon, program director, France Telecom
3
Customer solution at a glance
Primary hardware
• HP ProLiant BL680c G5 server blades
• HP Integrity BL860c G5 server blades
• HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures
Primary software
• HP Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) Advanced Pack
• HP Systems Insight Manager
• Microsoft®
Exchange Server 2003
• VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise
• Microsoft Windows®
Server 2003
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Solaris 10
• IBM AIX
• HP-UX
Operating system
VMware ESX Server 3.5
HP Services
HP service and support (deployment, maintenance)
About France
Telecom
Through its Orange brand,
France Telecom serves 174 million
customers on five continents with
Internet, television, and mobile
services. To support growth
while reducing space, power,
and cooling requirements, it
is using virtualization on the
HP BladeSystem to contribute to a
projected three-year savings of
22 million euros.

4. Boosting performance on the fly
Since 30 percent of France Telecom’s annual revenue
is realized in the month of December, the team
needs to accommodate spikes in demand. Now it
can do so much more cost-efficiently. “We use the
capacity management tools to dynamically allocate
and balance our existing resources as needed for our
busiest month,” Renaudon says. “We don’t have to
overbuy hardware, and we can remove or redeploy
resources when the rush is over.”
Recovery in hours instead of weeks
With global, 24×7 operations and an increasingly
competitive marketplace, availability is critical at
France Telecom. For the IT team, that means fail-safe
disaster recovery.
The IT team has classified each of France Telecom’s
applications as gold, silver, or bronze, depending on
the speed with which it needs to be recovered in the
event of a disaster. Gold and silver applications have
service-level agreements (SLAs) for faster recovery.
In a proof of concept test, the team virtualized
gold, silver, and bronze applications on an
HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure in one data center.
The server images are kept on a local storage system
and replicated asynchronously to a storage system
at another data center, which is connected to an
identical HP BladeSystem. “In case of disaster, we will
be able to fail-over gold and silver applications from
the HP BladeSystem at one site to the BladeSystem
at the other site in minutes,” Renaudon notes. Our
recovery time objective (RTO) is now four hours. That
compares with weeks to recover from tape. We are
just starting this pilot.”
One year into the three-year virtualization project,
the Eco Center is living up to its promise. “So far,
we have saved 1.4 megawatts,” Renaudon sums up.
“Add together the savings in power, business taxes,
maintenance costs, and data center space that we
don’t have to build, and we project a total savings of
22 million euros over the next three years. It’s proof
that ‘together, we can do more.’”
Technology for better business outcomes
To learn more, visit www.hp.com
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4AA2-3767ENW, January 2009