Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Wells’ Dairy Consolidates Servers to Cut Costs, Increase Availability, and Improve Security
Overview
Country: United States
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Wells’ Dairy, headquartered in Le Mars, Iowa, is the largest family owned and managed dairy processor in the United States. It has approximately 2,500 employees and produces more than 500 branded products.
Business Situation
Wells’ Dairy wanted to upgrade existing file and print servers to take advantage of newer technology and to consolidate servers, increase availability and reliability, and improve business processes.
Solution
Microsoft® Windows® Storage Server 2003 and EMC NetWin storage devices now provide Wells’ Dairy with centralized data storage and management, greater data availability, reliability, and reduced costs.
Benefits
n Simplified implementation
n Increased availability
n Better reliability and improved security features
n Better business decisions / “With Windows Storage Server 2003 and using LEGATO RepliStor for replication, we can provide a higher service level to our users and also be assured of system availability.”
Steve Spieler, Systems Engineer, Wells’ Dairy
For more than 90 years, Wells’ Dairy has been a leader in the manufacture and sale of ice cream, frozen novelties, and dairy products. To stay ahead of the competition, company managers sought to employ cutting-edge technology to support business operations. The company’s management decided to consolidate its current file server and upgrade its file and print cluster. Wells’ Dairy selected a solution based on the Microsoft® Windows Server SystemTM, with Microsoft Windows® Storage Server 2003 powering EMC NetWin 200 storage devices. The solution is providing cost efficiencies, capitalizing on existing server assets, and helps Wells’ Dairy meet its availability and reliability requirements. It also aids the company in improving reporting capabilities for more effective information management.
Situation
Founded in 1913, Wells’ Dairy, Inc. is the largest family-owned and managed dairy processor in the United States. Best known for its Blue Bunny ice cream and dairy products, today, Wells’ Dairy produces more than 500 Blue Bunny–branded products, from ice cream and frozen novelties to milk, yogurt, and snack dips. Its products are distributed and sold throughout the United States and in several other countries around the world.
With its state-of-the-art production facilities, the company has been cited by many industry experts as one of the most technically advanced in the industry. The Wells family believes that they have the facilities, technology, vision, and people in place to keep the company growing and to advance the distribution of the company's products well into the future. This confidence, along with its family values and Midwestern roots, has served the company well for over 90 years.
The backbone of the Wells’ Dairy business operation is its information services group, which is charged with providing the technology to best support the company’s business processes. To maintain a state-of-the art position with respect to its technology solutions, the company decided to upgrade its existing Microsoft® Windows NT® 4.0 operating system–based file servers and Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system–based file and print cluster. By consolidating servers and upgrading to newer technology, Wells’ Dairy hoped to cut costs and increase availability, reliability, security, and performance, as well as provide improved reporting for better information management.
Solution
Once the decision was made to upgrade, company managers encouraged the information services staff to review solution options before making a final recommendation. Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 and Network Appliance Filer were evaluated. The information services team concluded that upgrading to the Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM integrated server software, with Windows Storage Server 2003, would cost less than purchasing additional server hardware and using storage area network (SAN) storage. In fact, the cost of the Microsoft solution was significantly less—over U.S.$300,000 less than a solution based on Network Appliance Filer. In addition, other solutions would not have fit seamlessly into the company’s Windows-based environment, nor would they have allowed Wells’ Dairy to take advantage of its existing Windows 2000 Server–based server assets through consolidation.
Wells’ Dairy implemented a solution based on Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure. Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003, part of the Windows Server System, powers new EMC NetWin 200 devices that are connected to an EMC CX300 CLARiiON disk storage array. With Windows Storage Server 2003, Wells’ Dairy has a dedicated file server that offers a dependable and highly scalable storage solution. It integrates seamlessly with the company’s existing infrastructure, is proving to be easy for IT staff to install and manage, and offers the consolidation and performance features that the company wanted in order to simplify data storage and management, file serving, and data backup.
To initiate the project, Microsoft Consulting Services spent two weeks assisting Wells’ Dairy staff with planning, design, and the initial stages of implementation. Consolidation began with the company’s servers that used Windows 2000 Server. Steve Spieler, Systems Engineer at Wells’ Dairy, notes the successes. “To consolidate our Windows 2000 Servers to Windows Storage Server 2003,” he notes, “we used the DFS [distributed file services] Consolidation Root Wizard from the Microsoft File Server Migration Toolkit to migrate the server names and shares to a stand-alone DFS root on Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003. This made our migration to Windows Storage Server 2003 much easier. Our users didn’t have to change their shortcuts or links to documents and applications that were pointing to the old server names.” To make file migration even more efficient, Spieler is using Robocopy, a Windows Resource Kit tool, to mirror data from the Windows 2000 Server-based cluster to the new Windows Storage Server–based servers. The next step involved using the process to migrate Windows NT 4.0–based servers to Windows Storage Server 2003.
Wells’ Dairy has two data centers that support its 10 branch offices and approximately 2,500 employees. The new storage solution consolidated the data center’s two-node cluster, which consists of five server groups with 1.5 terabytes of data that are attached to a SAN with more than 2 terabytes of data. When implementation is complete, each data center will have an EMC NetWin 200 device connected to an EMC CX300 CLARiiON storage disk array that uses a Dell server front end and Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system. Data will be replicated between the two centers using LEGATO RepliStor software on the NetWin devices. “With Windows Storage Server2003, and using LEGATO RepliStor for replication, we can provide a higher service level to our users and also be assured of system availability,” says Spieler.
Initially, the company will use Windows Storage Server 2003 as a file server, but eventually will migrate its print server over as well. Future plans also include copying data from the Windows 2000 Server–based servers in the company’s remote branch offices to one of the NetWin devices. This move will simplify management of tape backups by placing this task in the hands of staff at the home office and removing it from each branch office site.
Still too early in the implementation to be using all the features, Wells’ Dairy does plan to take advantage of new Windows Server System features such as native Active Directory® directory service, Volume Shadow Copy Services, Distributed File Services, File Replication Services, Multipath Input/Output, Terminal Services Support, Resource Management Utilities, and support for all common antivirus software once implementation is complete.
Benefits
Simplified Migration
The DFS Consolidation Root Wizard in the File Server Migration Toolkit reduced the effect of server consolidation and migration on end users by allowing original naming structures to be used—user files and e-mail messages continue to work transparently after migration. Spieler sums it up in the following way, “The DFS Consolidation Root Wizard worked extremely well—we provided server names and the naming structure, and then ran the Wizard. It automatically moved all the server names and shares from our existing server into the new naming structure. When it was finished, the original server names and shares were in the stand-alone DFS. The DFS then referenced the new Windows Storage Servers. The instructions were easy to follow.”
Increased Availability
With its previous file server cluster, Wells’ Dairy used two redundant servers that pointed to one set of shared disks. If, for some reason, the SAN was down for maintenance or a problem, all file server data was unavailable. With Windows Storage Server, Wells’ Dairy is using a structure in which two NetWin devices are used for replicating data from one to the other—if one goes down, an alias (name) is moved from the downed server to the other available one, ensuring that users have uninterrupted availability to data. In addition, this configuration takes advantage of the Dynamic Disk feature in Windows Storage Server, which enables Wells’ Dairy to increase disk space, as required, without taking a production server offline.
The combination of availability and flexibility provided by EMC’s CLARiiON networked storage, together with the simplicity of the Microsoft Storage Server operating system, is giving Wells’ Dairy a powerful solution with the reliability and availability the company requires, as well as simplified management through a familiar Windows interface.
Better Reliability and Improved Security
Because Windows Server 2003 operating system is the most secure and reliable operating system that Microsoft has released to date, Wells’ Dairy is confident it will receive the system reliability and security requirements it wanted when the decision was made to upgrade technology. “Windows Storage Server 2003 is more secure out-of-the-box compared to other older versions of Windows Server,” notes Spieler, who goes on to say, “Microsoft is also doing an excellent job of creating documentation and white papers around security to help server administrators better understand how to lock servers down even more.”
Better Business Decisions
Although migration is still in the early stages, Wells’ Dairy managers anticipate that this solution will reduce data storage costs and complexities, while providing a server consolidation solution that will help the company meet its strategic business objectives. “By using the customized reports and other utilities that are built into the Windows Storage Server 2003 operating system, we can better control our disk space and manage data volumes and information,” concludes Spieler.
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on Windows Server 2003. It creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft’s holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This allows you to reduce the costs of ongoing operations; deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure; and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.
For more information about Windows Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem