Customer Solution Case Study
/ Seafood Company Raises IT Performance and Security with Unified Management Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Agriculture—Fishing industry
Customer Profile
Taylor Shellfish Farms is a family-owned seafood business based in Washington state. Founded more than 100 years ago, it has 400 employees and worldwide revenues of U.S.$50 million.
Business Situation
Taylor Shellfish Farms needed a simple, efficient way to proactively monitor its North America IT infrastructure, and to implement software updates and deployments.
Solution
Using Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 for centralized network monitoring, Taylor Shellfish Farms has automated software distribution, including security updates, and improved troubleshooting.
Benefits
· Centralized monitoring simplifies troubleshooting
· Automated software updates improve security, performance
· Server virtualization to offer further efficiencies / “System Center Essentials had everything we wanted. It met our immediate needs, and with the virtualization capabilities, it will enable us to enhance IT management well into the future.”
Jorge Cortes-Monroy, Information and Technology Director, Taylor Shellfish Farms
Taylor Shellfish Farms, a family-owned seafood business for more than 100 years, has 400 employees and worldwide revenues of U.S.$50 million. Because the Washington-based company employs just one person to manage its entire North America IT infrastructure, it sought to convert its IT operation from a largely manual one to a centralized, more automated system. As an early adopter of Microsoft® System Center Essentials 2010 technology, Taylor Shellfish Farms is now proactively monitoring its IT environment and troubleshooting issues from a central location. Software updates and deployments are accelerated through automation, enhancing security, system performance, and employee productivity. When the company implements Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology in late 2009, it expects to realize even greater efficiencies.
Situation
Taylor Shellfish Farms is a family-owned seafood business based in Washington state. The company, which was founded more than 100 years ago, has grown into a renowned operation with 400 employ-ees, a presence that extends beyond the U.S. into Canada and Hong Kong, and worldwide revenues of U.S.$50 million.
IT services for the U.S. and Canada are handled by one person: Jorge Cortes-Monroy, Information and Technology Director for Taylor Shellfish Farms. Cortes-Monroy singlehandedly manages everything having to do with IT, from ensuring the reliability of eight servers and 60 PCs, to keeping the entire infrastructure updated and secure, to installing new software for employees and fielding help-desk issues. With employees dispersed among six buildings on 40 acres in the company’s headquarters, and in several locations throughout Washington state and British Columbia, Canada, not only was it challenging for Cortes-Monroy to manage all his responsibilities, but it was also quite time-consuming.
“Because everything was manual, Jorge had to go onsite to handle any issues that arose, and that often meant that he was indisposed and unavailable for large chunks of time,” says Steve Marsh, Controller for Taylor Shellfish Farms. Cortes-Monroy also had to manually check each client and server computer to see if it had enough memory and hard disk drive capacity.
This lag in response could have profound effects on Taylor Shellfish Farms operations and services to end customers. “Every product we ship has a tag that includes information such as which farm it came from and when it was harvested. Our employees enter that data into a computer so that the tags can be printed. But if the computer is down because of problems or a needed update, the 15 people who process and ship the product have to wait until the computer is back up before they can get their jobs done. This downtime could result in delayed shipments to end customers—something we want to avoid at all costs,” Marsh explains.
Taylor Shellfish Farms is adamant about keeping its software up-to-date. Productivity was often hampered when employees were not using the same—newest—versions of applications. For instance, it was not uncommon for Cortes-Monroy to get calls when employees couldn’t open a file that another employee had sent. When he physically pinpointed the problem, he often found that the employees were using different versions of the software and had run into compatibility issues. He would then have to install a new version of the software, during which time the employee could not use his desktop.
Software updates are also critical for security reasons. “At least once a month, particularly after Microsoft sends out its Tuesday updates, I have to verify that the new updates are installed on our machines. I can check the servers easily because they’re in my building, but I had to visit all of our locations to check the PCs,” says Cortes-Monroy. “Even visiting offices wasn’t guaranteed to work because some people might have taken their laptops to another location, or be working from home, and I’d have to track them down or wait until they returned.” He typically spent one to two days every month just verifying that all required updates were in place and applying the updates himself, when needed.
Taylor Shellfish Farms wanted to find a simple, efficient way to proactively monitor its network and centralize the management of updates and new application deployments, while minimizing downtime that resulted from employees waiting for updates and problem resolution.
Solution
When Cortes-Monroy began searching for a solution in early 2009, he immediately went to the Microsoft Web site. “Ninety percent of our software is from Microsoft,” he says. “I always look to Microsoft®-based products first because I have a tremendous amount of confidence in them. I knew that if we could find the right product for this project, it would be reliable and well-supported.”
After finding and researching the Microsoft System Center suite of products, Cortes-Monroy chose Microsoft System Center Essentials technology, which is designed to help midsize businesses simplify the way they monitor, deploy, and update their servers, clients, and software. Because Taylor Shellfish Farms had had a positive experience with the Microsoft Technology Adopter Program (TAP) for Microsoft Dynamics® GP business software, he signed up the company to be part of the Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 TAP in April 2009.
“We went live with the software right away, and it was extremely easy. I did the implementation myself, with some help from the TAP team, and was able to deploy it in just 30 minutes,” notes Cortes-Monroy. “I was surprised that such a comprehensive product—which enables me to centrally monitor and manage our entire network from my office—was so easy to deploy, and that I was able to benefit from it so quickly.”
Taylor Shellfish Farms runs System Center Essentials 2010, which includes virtualization technology, on an HP ProLiant ML115 G5 server. The company will use the virtualization technology to consolidate its server farm by converting four of its eight physical servers to Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise R2 with Hyper-V™–based virtual machines, and further streamline management of the infrastructure. Says Cortes-Monroy, “System Center Essentials had everything we wanted. It met our immediate needs, and with the virtualization capabilities, it will enable us to enhance IT manage-ment well into the future.”
The company plans to implement the virtualization technology in November 2009. It expects to have two virtual machines running on one host by the end of the year, when it will have virtualized a print server, file server, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Benefits
Using Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010, Cortes-Monroy is able to proactively monitor the Taylor Shellfish Farms IT environment, accelerate and simplify software updates, provide enhanced security, and troubleshoot issues faster. Just as important, computer downtime resulting from deployments and updates is minimized, keeping the business up and running and helping product reliably reach customers. When the company implements Hyper-V virtualization technology later this year, Taylor Shellfish Farms expects to realize even greater efficiencies.
Centralized Monitoring Simplifies Troubleshooting
“I don’t have to visit failed computers now,” Cortes-Monroy says. “I just go to the System Center Essentials console and remotely diagnose the problem computer. I don’t even have to know where the computer is located—I can control the computers from my console.”
Taylor Shellfish Farms can also mitigate issues before they become problems. For instance, Cortes-Monroy can see how much memory and disk space each computer is using and, if any are nearing capacity, he can enhance them before performance problems result. “There’s been a marked decrease in help-desk complaints about slow-running computers since we started using System Center Essentials. We’re completely satisfied with the product,” Marsh says.
Automated Software Updates Improve Productivity, Security
Because Cortes-Monroy no longer has to drive to each location to install and verify updates, he gains one to two days every month—time that is quite valuable. “Updates are so simple. I just schedule them to occur at night and, before I arrive at work the next day, I check my Windows® mobile device for an e-mail about the network status. If there are any problems, once I get to the office, I can determine the cause and resolve them without leaving my desk,” says Cortes-Monroy.
Marsh adds, “The time we save is actually more than the day or two Jorge used to spend on updates. If he wasn’t able to fix things on a timely basis before, they could snowball into larger problems—and that would end up eating up even more of his time and hurting employee productivity.”
Taylor Shellfish Farms can also better control which updates are installed on which computers. This is critical, because sometimes updates can cause computers to crash, and not all the computers need every update. Now, if the company has a computer that tends to crash with certain updates, Cortes-Monroy can configure System Center Essentials to bypass that computer when installing updates.
Companies that use System Center Essentials receive software updates from Microsoft as soon as they are released to the public. This head start helps Taylor Shellfish Farms improve its system security. “It helps protect against zero-day attacks,” Marsh notes. “Sometimes, malicious viruses are introduced right after updates are released because the attackers target the supposed vulner-ability. Now that our updates are synchronized with the Microsoft update database, we’re not in danger of users waiting to install updates until it’s too late.”
“Now that Jorge is not bogged down with software updates, monitoring, and troubleshooting, he has time to work on more business-critical projects, such as managing our new Geographic Information System (GIS) solution for our farms,” adds Marsh. “If he was still tied up with all the day-to-day computer tasks, we’d have to either pay an outside consultant to do the GIS work or, more likely, our daily computer needs would suffer because Jorge’s efforts would be directed elsewhere.”
Server Virtualization to Offer Further Efficiencies
Once Taylor Shellfish Farms implements Hyper-V the company expects to realize even greater productivity as well as cost savings. “I’ll be able to direct the management console to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine, and can have that virtual machine up and running easily,” says Cortes-Monroy. “And, if we experience a system failure, I’ll be able to get a new virtual machine up and running right away. Downtime will be minimal.”
Because Taylor Shellfish Farms will have 50 percent fewer physical servers, and will be able to better utilize the resources on each physical machine, it expects to save time and money in infrastructure management. It also expects upgrade processes will be easier. “In the past, if I did an upgrade on a physical server and it crashed, I could spend weeks trying to fix the error and reimaging the machine. But with virtualization, I can just roll back to a previous snapshot and resolve the problem immediately,” Cortes-Monroy says.
“Centralizing IT management through System Center Essentials has had a tremendous impact on our business by enabling us to operate very efficiently. And virtualization will streamline everything even more. I’m one hundred percent satisfied with the technology,” Marsh concludes.
Microsoft System Center
System Center solutions help IT pros manage the physical and virtual information technology (IT) environments across data centers, client computers, and devices. Using these integrated and automated management solutions, IT organizations can be more productive service providers to their businesses.
For more information on Microsoft System Center please visit:
www.microsoft.com/systemcenter