Using
Deep Virtualization to Rationalize Platforms and Data Centers
The
latest Briefings Direct end-user case-study uncovers how outerwear and
sportswear maker and distributor Columbia Sportswear has used virtualization
techniques and benefits to significantly improve their business
operations.
We’ll
see how Columbia Sportswear’s use of deep virtualization assisted in
rationalizing its platforms and data center, as well as led to benefits in their
enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. We’ll also learn how
virtualizing mission-critical applications formed a foundation for improved
disaster recovery (DR) best practices.
Here
are some excerpts:
Gardner:
Tell me a little bit about how you got into virtualization. What were some of
the requirements that you needed to fulfill at the data center level?
Leeper:
Pre-2009, we'd experimented with virtualization. It'd be one of those things
that I had my teams working on, mostly so we could tell my boss that we were
doing it, but there wasn’t a significant focus on it. It was a nice toy to play
with in the corner and it helped us in some small areas, but there were no big
wins there.
Columbia
Sportswear is the worldwide leader in apparel and accessories. We sell primarily
outerwear and sportswear products, and a little bit of footwear, globally. We
have about 4,000 employees, 50 some-odd physical locations, not counting retail,
around the world. The products are primarily manufactured in Asia with sales
distribution happening in both Europe and United States.
My
teams out of the U.S. manage our global footprint, and we are the sole source of
IT support globally from here. In mid-2009, the board of directors at Columbia
decided that we, as a company, needed a much stronger DR plan. That included the
construction of a new data center for us to house our production environments
offsite.
Extremely
successful
We
were extremely successful in that process. We were able to move our primary data
center over a couple of weekends with very little downtime to the end users, and
that was all built on VMware technology.
About
a week after we had finished that project, I got a call from our CIO, who said
he had purchased a new ERP system, and Columbia was going to start down the path
of a fully new ERP implementation.
I
was being asked at that time what platform we should run it on, and we had a
clean slate to look everywhere we could to find what our favorite, what we felt
was the most safe and stable platform to run the crown jewels of the company
which is ERP. For us that was going to be the SAP stack.
Private
cloud
Leeper:
We consider ourselves having up a private cloud on-site. My team will probably
start laughing at me for using that term, but we do believe we have a very
flexible and dynamic environment to deploy, based on business request on
premises, and we're pretty proud of that. It works pretty well for
us.
Where
we go next is all over the place. One of the things we're pretty happy about is
the fact that we can think about things a little differently now than probably a
lot of our peers, because of how migratory our workloads can be, given the
virtualization. We started looking into things like hybrid cloud approaches and
the idea of maybe moving some of our workloads out of our premises, our own data
facilities, to a cloud provider somewhere else.
For
us, that's not necessarily the discussion around the classic public cloud
strategies for scalability and some of those things. For us, it's a temporary
space at times, if we are, say, moving an office, we want to be able to provide
zero downtime, and we have physical equipment on-premises.
It
would be nice to be able to shutdown their physical equipment, move their data,
move their workloads up to a temporary spot for four or five weeks, and then
bring it back at some point, and let users never see an outage while they are
working from home or on the road. There are some interesting scenarios around DR
for us and locations where we don't have real-time DR set up.
There
are some interesting scenarios around significant DR for us and locations where
we don't have real-time DR set up. For instance, we were looking into some
issues in Japan, when Japan unfortunately a year or so ago was dealing with the
earthquake and the tsunami fallout in power.
For
further information visit: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.
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