Improved response times to business request, dynamic automated IT provisioning, complete transparency into people, capital and IT resources for business operations, plus reduced carbon footprint and lower cost. These are what Pernod Ricard in Australia are striving to deliver on the back of its drive to virtualize its data center and create a fully functioning private cloud environment to serve the business.

According to Ryan Klose, CIO of Pernod Ricard Premium Wines Brands in Australia, the company embarked on this journey when it first started to virtualize its servers, most of which were Linux-based. "As we started the process of virtualizing the servers we quickly realized the benefits, but we saw that virtual systems also created a new level of complexity."

Virtual pools With a pool of virtual servers at its disposal, to be effective the IT team needed to quickly identify and deliver the computing resource to meet the business need in as automated a fashion as possible.

Working with Novell and its PlateSpin orchestration tools, Pernod Ricard has started to put in place the management platform to derive this capability. "This virtualization process has given us the ability to procure resources very quickly and increase the number of servers we can leverage at any given time," noted Klose.

Prior to this the provisioning of a server for a new request could take weeks, now it's within hours and days, he added. "This has really reduced admin and management costs as well as cut down power usage and our CO2 emissions."

The current virtualization drive has also led the company onto a clear path towards building a private cloud environment where resources can be leveraged on-demand and the infrastructure is delivered as a dynamic service to the business.

In addition to Novell, Pernod Ricard has also tapped Oracle's cloud management tools to help create this private cloud capability.

Klose notes that this goal is based on the push for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and leveraging a virtualized data center. Granular control The aim is to get complete visibility into all business transactions so that when an order comes in Pernod Ricard can immediately determine what resources are required to execute that order from humans, to trucks, to warehouse needs and so on.

"This gives us the ability to know every workload and resource requirement at each of the say 20 steps of a typical order process execution,' said Klose. These 20 steps can have preset resource needs and target completion times and conditions that are set by business rules, while the software environment monitors and manages this workflow. If the process is behind or hits a problem it can be flagged in an automated fashion and immediately addressed.

"This gives us complete visibility into resource allocation even before orders hit the systems and to enable this same visibility into IT resources as well as other key resources is our goal," Klose said. By knowing immediately how much processing power and bandwidth is required for each and every order or business request enables IT to be proactive in managing and procuring IT resources.

"The more transparency we can create, the better we can provide high performance to the business," said Klose.

Company: Pernod Ricard Asia Pacific (Premium Wine Brands)
Industry: Food & Beverage
Country: Australia
Vendor partners: Novell, Oracle 
 

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