4-page Case Study - Posted 9/8/2008

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Del Monte Foods

Del Monte Uses Virtualization to Save Power and Speed Software Deployment

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Del Monte Foods has been producing food since 1916. The company depends on accurate demand forecasting, which requires extensive collaboration and data-intensive analysis. The IT department is tasked with meeting these business demands while keeping costs low to reduce corporate overhead. Del Monte Foods is using the Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to speed the testing process for product upgrades, allowing the IT department to deploy new technologies faster.

Situation

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Del Monte Foods has been producing food for consumers since 1916. Del Monte Foods is now one of the largest and most well known producers, distributors, and marketers of premium-quality, branded food and pet products for the U.S. retail market; and the company has been able to achieve the leading or second-place market share in most of the product categories in which it competes. Del Monte Foods produces 95 percent of its sales in the highly competitive U.S. market. The company has achieved this success by offering high-quality products at competitive prices.

The IT department supports the success of Del Monte Foods by enabling efficient business processes and fostering the collaborative business environment needed to continue the company’s history of innovative products. Del Monte Foods uses a broad portfolio of Microsoft® products to meet these business demands and tends to deploy new Microsoft technologies soon after they are released.

The IT department noticed that the testing and development of new applications and environments or product upgrades was consuming a large amount of resources. The department is responsible for performing tests to prepare for an average of 10 large deployment projects each year. Simultaneously, there are hundreds of smaller IT testing projects as applications are rolled out or upgraded.

For a large test environment that required specific hardware, the process could take months. “Previously when a new test project came up, the first thought was to buy new hardware,” notes Jonathan Wynn, Manager of Advanced Technology & Collaborative Services at Del Monte Foods. “This can be a long process because you have to get a quote, get money to pay for it, have it delivered, and then install the servers and any software.” Many times, two to three weeks had gone by before any actual testing was completed.

Another issue was that this hardware was then dedicated to this project for the duration of the test. However, because test projects are completed in stages, with breaks in between to evaluate the results and make decisions on deployment options, hardware would, at times, remain idle.

Solution

Del Monte Foods joined the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for the Windows Server® 2008 operating system to investigate the use of virtualization technology to solve these issues. The company has been testing the Hyper-V™ virtualization technology as a new environment for hosting applications in the data center and for testing and qualification projects.

Hyper-V provides scalability and high performance by supporting the following key features:

• Guest multi-processing support.
• 64-bit guest and host support.
• Reliability and security through hypervisor architecture.
• Flexibility and manageability by supporting features such as quick migration of virtual machines from one physical host to another.
• Integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Recently, testing was conducted for an upgrade to Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Del Monte Foods created a two-stage environment for testing with six servers in each stage and two

Using virtualization has made us … able to respond to more requests … because we can use servers that are already in the data center and quickly get the test environment installed and running. Timothy Fraps Architecture Analyst, Del Monte Foods

Previously, setting up a complex test environment such as the one described above would have taken months of work Using Hyper-V, Del Monte Foods was able to create the environment in less than one week using existing hardware. And, the benefits go beyond the setup. The virtual Office SharePoint Server environment is now portable and can be copied to a file and sent to test engineers at other locations. For the SharePoint project, two test teams collaborated by simply sending the file back and forth. Hyper-V also makes it possible to take snapshots before making changes to an environment so that it can be rolled back to its previous state.

Del Monte Foods test environment includes about twenty virtual servers running on five physical servers and includes Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Office SharePoint Server, Live Communications Server, Systems Center Operations Manager, and Systems Center Configuration Manager. This test environment is currently being used to test the upgrade to Exchange 2009 and will be used in the near future to test Office Communications Server and the upcoming version of Microsoft Office.

Benefits

Using Hyper-V, Del Monte Foods was able to decrease the costs of testing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Hyper-V virtualization generates savings by making it easier to reuse hardware for testing and enabling the testers to load new applications quickly.

Virtualization greatly reduced the time to complete the testing on Office SharePoint Server, which allowed the IT department to deploy the upgraded solution faster, benefitting end-users, and allowing the testers time to complete more projects. “With virtualization I am typically able to work on four projects at a time,” explains Jason Gianfrancesco, Principal Technical Architect, Del Monte Foods. “I would only be able to handle two at a time before.” In addition to managing more projects, the engineers can also complete them faster.

With the added flexibility provided by Hyper-V virtualization, the IT department can respond to business requests more quickly and deploy applications faster. “Using virtualization has made us more of a partner with the business,” explains Timothy Fraps, Architecture Analyst, Del Monte Foods. “We are able to respond to more requests and usually we can get started immediately because we can use servers that are already in the data center and quickly get the test environment installed and running.”

About Piedmont Consultants

This business value case study was developed by Piedmont Consultants, a specialized technology marketing firm that helps technology companies implement a value-based approach to selling their products and services. For more information about Piedmont Consultants, visit the Web site at:
www.piedmontconsultants.com

Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
Together, Hyper-V technology, a key feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 provide a reliable virtualization technology and comprehensive management solution that make it easier for customers to virtualize their IT infrastructure and reduce costs. With integrated administration, customers can use a single console to centralize management of a heterogeneous virtual machine infrastructure; increase physical server utilization; rapidly provision new virtual machines; and provide dynamic performance and resource optimization of hardware, operating systems, and applications. Both of these technologies easily plug into existing infrastructures, so companies can continue to use their current patching, provisioning, management, and support tools and processes. This combined virtualization technology and management solution also provides great value, because customers can make the most of their IT professionals' skill set, the breadth of solutions from Microsoft Partners, and comprehensive support from Microsoft.

For more information, go to:
www.microsoft.com/hyper-v
www.microsoft.com/scvmm

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Del Monte Foods products and services, call (415) 247-3000 or visit the Web site at:
www.delmonte.com