Success Story

SoilBuild Group Holdings Ltd

Intelligent Application of Virtualization Technology

SoilBuild Group Holdings Ltd

Soilbuild Group Holdings Ltd (Soilbuild) is a leading integrated property group with a successful track record of constructing, developing and managing an award-winning portfolio of residential and business space properties.

Soilbuild manages close to 4 million square feet of business space for lease, catering to the diverse space requirements of industrialists and businesses. The Group has developed a range of residential properties from high-end luxury condominiums to townhouses and conservation terraces.

By harnessing its construction capabilities and extensive network of specialized contractors, Soilbuild has also expanded its construction arm under Soilbuild Construction Group Ltd to provide design and build solution services, turnkey projects as well as project management consultancy for both private and public entities. Since 2013, Soilbuild Construction has been listed on the Singapore Exchange. This gives the Group greater visibility and a funding platform to expand its construction capabilities and reach overseas market.

Over the years, Soilbuild has also built up capabilities in its specialist Lease Management, Asset Management and Fund Management teams, culminating in the listing of Soilbuild Business Space REIT in the Singapore Exchange in August 2013.

Today, Soilbuild offers an integrated real estate platform providing a full spectrum of real estate solutions to both private and public companies.

The Challenge

Due to technology limitations at the time of their last technology refresh, Soilbuild was running their business applications on a fleet of physical servers. That, presented several challenges:

High Cost – Server Infrastructure
Yearly depreciation of the Server infrastructure was high.

Single Point of Failure – No High Availability
If one server went down, all the business applications running on that server would stop running (Single Point of Failure).

High Cost to Achieve High Availability
To achieve high availability with physical servers, they would have to double their investments.

The availability of new technologies in the market prompted Mr Tan Chee Yong, Assistant Manager of Soilbuild, to initiate and lead a project to address the challenges.

The Process

System Integrators with a reliable and proven track record of success were invited to study the situation and submit designs and proposals that would address the challenges. After a rigorous evaluation process, Adventus Singapore was selected by Soilbuild to undertake the project. Working closely with the client, the team from Adventus Singapore took the following approach:

Step1: Studying and understanding the computing resources needed to consistently run their business applications smoothly and reliably

Step 2: Understanding the IT vision and future requirements of the client

Step 3: Solution Design and Implementation Plan

Step 4: Implementing the solution

The Solutions

Minor Upgrades were made to 65% of their physical servers
Minor upgrades were done to improve the performance and capacity for 65% of their physical servers. These were done by increasing the storage capacity by 50% and RAM by 100%.
Implemented bare-metal hypervisor as the virtualization platform with high availability on the upgraded servers
Understanding the needs of the client and with extensive experience in the field of Virtualization, the team from Adventus concluded that the technology was good enough to meet Soilbuild’s requirements.
Migrated all production servers as virtual machines onto the Virtual Hosts (P to V Migration)
Using specialized tools and proprietary processes, the team from Adventus was able to complete the migration smoothly without having to shut down any production server in the process.

Outcomes

30% yearly cost savings on hardware costs required to run their business applicationsAfter the minor technology upgrades, the hardware required to run Soilbuild’s business applications was reduced by 35%. The net effect was a 30% yearly cost savings on the hardware depreciation for this purpose.
Huge cost savings for their backup and DR Infrastructure project35% of their fleet of servers was repurposed for another improvement project – Backup and Disaster Recovery Infrastructure. This saved Soilbuild the need to purchase additional hardware for that project, achieving huge cost savings for that project.
Achieving High Availability for their production serversThe risks associated with a single point of failure before was now totally eliminated.
Huge cost savings from employing virtualization technology to achieve High AvailabilityComparing with the solution of using physical servers to achieve high availability of their systems, that requires the doubling of their hardware investments, this solution has generated huge cost savings.
Huge yearly cost savings from adopting a license fee free virtualization technologyThe intelligent adoption and deployment of a license fee free solution that meets the needs of Soilbuild has saved them huge yearly licensing fees.
Minutes of downtime during migrationWith their specialized tools and proprietary processes, the experienced team of engineers from Adventus was able to deliver the project successfully without major impact on the production servers in the process.

The team from Adventus Singapore has clearly differentiated themselves from their competitors by not blindly advocating popular solutions but was focused on addressing our needs with the right solutions instead. Adventus has proven themselves to be a trustworthy system integrator that applies cutting edge technologies intelligently and adds enormous value to their clients,

Mr Tan Chee Yong, Assistant Manager of Soilbuild Group Holdings Ltd