Total Wine & More

Wine Retailer Uses Integrated IT Management to Support Growth, Improve Store Service

Total Wine & More is “America’s Wine Superstore,” operating 54 stores in 11 states and carrying thousands of different wines, spirits, and beers. With the company’s success and growth has come a proliferation of servers to support new business initiatives, and an associated increase in technology management work. To relieve the IT staff of the need to manually manage store and data center servers, Total Wine took advantage of Microsoft® System Center solutions to automate server imaging, application and update deployment, server monitoring, and backup. With fewer technology management chores, Total Wine can better grow its business and roll out new services. Store employees spend more time focusing on customers and accomplishing productive tasks thanks to more reliable systems, better backup management, and fewer local server problems.

 

Situation

Total Wine & More is the largest independent fine-wine retailer in the United States and the only major wine company to operate in multiple states. Each of its stores carries approximately 8,000 types of wine, 2,000 types of spirits, and 1,000 different beers. Total Wine differentiates itself not only by its selection of beverages but also by its highly trained wine experts. The Potomac, Maryland–based company employs approximately 1,800 people, 175 of whom work in Potomac and the rest of whom work in regional offices and the company’s 54 stores.

System Center has really enabled us to be more proactive in the way we think about our business and freed up time for our staff to take on new projects that will move the business forward. Todd Slan Director of Technology, Total Wine & More

The beverage and alcohol market is highly regionalized, with state and county laws that govern the supply, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages. Total Wine is the only beverage and alcohol chain store that operates in multiple states—and it owes this accomplishment to its use of technology to support business goals. Total Wine has succeeded where others have failed by creating a custom suite of core business programs, including point-of-sale (POS), supply chain, distribution, and inventory management software. Every time the company rolls out a store in a new state, it simply modifies these custom applications—created using the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 development system, the Microsoft .NET Framework, and Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software—to accommodate the new regulations.

Installing these custom and out of-the-box applications on headquarter and store systems consumed more time as Total Wine grew. The company’s double-digit growth since its foundation in 1991 caused the IT infrastructure to multiply to the point where the IT staff was being pulled away from strategic initiatives to address application deployment, software updates, server setup, and problem troubleshooting. “On one hand, our IT infrastructure has been critical to our ability to expand the business quickly; but at the same time, our fast-growing infrastructure began to require so much attention that it was an impediment to business growth,” explains Todd Slan, Director of Technology for Total Wine & More.

During the 1990s, Total Wine used desktop computers to run applications in each store. There were no servers, domains, or centralized management systems. The three-person IT staff collectively spent 350 nights a year on the road, traveling from store to store to manually install new software, upgrade software, and maintain hardware. “Updating software and rolling out servers took time away from strategizing growth and finding new ways to help our stores,” Slan says.

From 2002 through 2003, Total Wine replaced store desktop computers with servers and licensed Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 to help with application and update deployment. Still, rapid business growth led to the deployment of 125 servers in five years—one in each store and the rest split between the main data center in Potomac and a secondary data center in Tucson, Arizona.

The IT staff spent significant time backing up business data. As data volumes grew, the company’s Veritas Backup Exec backup software could not perform a full backup in the allotted backup window. “Volume management became a big challenge and was a very manual process,” Slan says. “Our engineers spent hours each day analyzing backups to figure out where to put data volumes so that all the backups would finish at the same time.”

Total Wine also wanted to minimize planned and unplanned downtime of store systems, which affected store sales and staff productivity. “Upgrading a server or application often took key store functions offline, which impacted a store’s ability to ring up sales and answer customer questions,” Slan says. “We have an incredibly highly trained staff that really knows wine. We don’t want them troubleshooting computer problems or stalled by computer outages.”

However, without prompt update deployment and hardware maintenance, critical applications were often unreliable and led to frequent system failures. When store systems failed, store staff had to leave customers and call the IT staff. One key store application, called POS Service, collects sales data from all store registers at the end of each business day and transmits it to a system in Potomac. If there is a glitch in the register polling process, the store cannot ring up sales the following day, which creates problems for the sales, customer service, accounting, inventory, and ordering departments. The POS Service application failed in at least one store every few days due to register communication problems.

 

Solution

Slan knew that the company needed more sophisticated infrastructure management tools before it could grow further. Otherwise, the work required to roll out new store systems and maintain existing applications would overwhelm the IT staff’s ability to take on new projects. Because Total Wine already used Systems Management Server 2003, it decided to investigate other Microsoft infrastructure optimization solutions.

We have an incredibly highly trained staff that really knows wine. We don’t want them troubleshooting computer problems or stalled by computer outages. Todd Slan Director of Technology, Total Wine & More

In early 2007, Total Wine deployed the beta version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software; Veritas Backup Exec did not support the program. Microsoft offered the beta version of Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, a disk-and-tape backup solution, which provided immediate backup support for Exchange Server 2007. “Not only did System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 provide backup for Exchange Server 2007, but its volume management features instantly reduced our backup chores by several hours each day,” Slan says. “For the first time, we were able to complete all our backups before the next business day.”

This success led Total Wine to hasten its investigation of Microsoft System Center solutions. “We liked the capabilities of the individual Microsoft System Center programs, but we also liked the suite concept, which made a lot of sense to us—using an integrated set of Microsoft programs to monitor and manage mostly Microsoft software–based workloads,” Slan says. “We also liked the suite licensing model that Microsoft offers. We’re moving into virtualization, and we’ll be able to extend our licensing efficiencies to virtual machines as well as to physical servers.” Total Wine obtained a license for the Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise, which bundles System Center Configuration Manager 2007, System Center Operations Manager 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 in one package.

Total Wine is using the following System Center applications:

System Center Configuration Manager 2007. Total Wine uses System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to quickly and easily roll out new applications and software upgrades, including its suite of custom business applications, so it can get new stores operating quickly and applications upgraded immediately. Total Wine also uses System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to speed server replacements. For example, a store server recently failed, and the IT staff was able to reimage and replace the server within a day.

System Center Operations Manager 2007. The real attraction of System Center Operations Manager 2007 for Total Wine was the program’s ability to monitor the POS Service application in stores. Total Wine wrote a small application based on the .NET Framework that works with System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor POS Service, ensure continuous operation, and automatically restart any failures. “To appreciate how important this service is to us, you have to understand our sales volumes,” Slan says. “We ring up an average of 2,500 transactions each day in our bigger stores. If we can’t capture every transaction for every store, we can’t give customers up-to-date information on our inventory or even ring up sales on the following day.” Total Wine also uses System Center Operations Manager 2007 to manage Exchange Server 2007, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, and SQL Server 2005.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007. Using System Center Data Protection Manager, Total Wine has achieved its goal of backing up all business data every night. System Center Data Protection Manager also supports automatic replication of data between the Potomac and Tucson data centers, easy volume management, and snapshots every 15 minutes. Total Wine uses System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 in conjunction with the Windows® Volume Shadow Copy Service to take snapshots of server data throughout the day.

“I’ve used many other backup applications, and while System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is constantly changing and growing, it is already as stable and reliable as any package out there, and more so in many cases,” says Robert DeSantos, Senior Systems Administrator at Total Wine & More. “The real-time protection has a smaller footprint then other applications I have used, and that’s important when you're talking about a mission-critical server.”

On some of its servers, Total Wine recently deployed the Windows Server® 2008 Standard operating system with Hyper-V™ virtualization technology to create and test virtual machines. Total Wine will deploy System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to deploy, tune, and manage its virtual machines. “Virtualization will save us a lot of rack space and management time,” Slan says. “We recently virtualized some older servers in minutes that we otherwise would have had to spend days replacing.” By late 2008, Total Wine will deploy Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server and Forefront Client Security, which provide malicious software protection for Exchange Server and client computers, respectively.

Total Wine runs most of its System Center solutions on HP ProLiant DL380 G5 servers that run the Windows Server 2008 Standard operating system; System Center Configuration Manager 2007 runs on the Windows Server 2003 R3 operating system.

Benefits

By deploying System Center solutions, Total Wine & More has been able to speed up server, application, and upgrade deployments and reduce technology management work. These efficiencies facilitate the company’s rapid growth. With fewer technology interruptions, store staff is more productive and stores are more profitable.

“Successful software deployment, backups, and system monitoring are critical to the functioning of the entire company,” says John Trone, Chief Information Officer for Total Wine. “The entire IT team at Total Wine and Microsoft Services deserve a lot of credit for such a quick and successful implementation.”

Support for Business Growth

Total Wine benefits from the simpler IT management that comes from a unified, highly integrated collection of business and management programs designed to work together. The company also realizes cost benefits from having these programs wrapped together with System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise.
 
“With System Center solutions, we can spend more time focusing on managing and growing our business,” Slan says. “We can now be more forward-thinking and proactive in how we approach our daily jobs; the IT staff spends less time in reactive mode and we’re able to take on a lot more projects that we never had the time to do.”

The System Center solutions have made us a much more agile organization, because we can deploy a new store in a very efficient, standardized manner…. This efficiency has a huge impact on how fast we can grow. Todd Slan Director of Technology, Total Wine & More

DeSantos adds, “As an IT network administrator, I’m encouraged with the System Center suite of programs and its future. The integration of the different components continues to grow, and that helps in setup, deployment, maintenance, reporting, and troubleshooting.”

Using System Center, Total Wine has cut the preparation for new-store openings from several weeks to several days. This includes everything from formatting hard drives and installing operating systems to installing the company’s custom business applications and getting updates to the right levels. “We spend less time doing the same process over and over again,” says Slan. Plus, Total Wine brings a higher level of control to the work. With System Center Configuration Manger 2007, there are fewer errors because images are standardized. “The System Center solutions have made us a much more agile organization because we can deploy a new store in a very efficient, standardized manner,” Slan says. “Our staff can walk into a store anywhere and encounter the same IT infrastructure. This efficiency has a huge impact on how fast we can grow.”

Total Wine estimates that the use of System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor the POS Service application has eliminated dozens of help-desk calls each week from stores experiencing problems. Also, automated zero-touch software distribution using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 eliminates the time the IT staff used to spend on the phone walking employees through reboot procedures. The IT staff can now schedule software distributions and updates when it is least disruptive to the business, and those distributions have a much higher success rate.

“Now that we can automatically and remotely deploy new applications and updates and monitor servers, we spend about four nights a year per new store doing physical server setup and maybe two to three additional nights implementing special projects,” Slan says. “That’s about 60 days of travel time annually versus the 350 nights a year we used to spend on the road managing store servers.” Using the extra time gained from more efficient management, the IT staff wrote a new program that assists with inventory management and sales collection. The staff will use System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to automatically deploy this application to all stores in late 2008, saving weeks of travel time for the IT staff.

Higher Sales Staff Productivity

Total Wine also uses System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to ensure that all store devices stay up and running, reducing the likelihood that highly trained salespeople are spending valuable time searching for inventory or administering servers. The reduction in help-desk calls to Potomac results in more time for store personnel to spend with customers, which contributes to the company’s bottom line. “The automated monitoring of store technology makes that technology more reliable so that our store staff has more time to sell,” Slan says. “Across 54 stores, this equates to hundreds of hours annually in additional selling time. Higher store staff productivity directly impacts store profits.”

Better Data Protection

Using System Center Data Protection Manager 2007, Total Wine can back up all business data before the next business day, something it could not do before. The hours each day that engineers spent managing backup volumes, backup schedules, and tape libraries can now be spent helping stores and developing new services.

Total Wine can now take snapshots of business data several times a day, which greatly simplifies file restores. “Since volume management is so easy, we can keep more backup data available, so we rarely have to go to tape to restore a file,” Slan says. “Instead, we can restore from disk, which is much faster. Our IT staff probably saves several hours a month in file restores. But more important is the timesaving for employees, who don’t have to spend hours recreating lost work.”

Improved Reliability and Availability

Total Wine has improved the reliability and availability of its technology infrastructure through the use of System Center. The rapid, automated backup of data between its data centers gives the company much better disaster preparedness. And the IT staff can be more

Now that we can automatically and remotely deploy new applications and updates and monitor servers, we spend about … 60 days of travel time annually versus the 350 nights a year we used to spend. Todd Slan Director of Technology, Total Wine & More

proactive in detecting and repairing server problems through alerts from System Center Operations Manager 2007. “While we may still experience problems, we can proactively correct them before the store manager notices them; that’s a huge win for us,” Slan says. “It’s even better when System Center Operations Manager 2007 automatically corrects a problem in the middle of the night, eliminating the need for the IT staff to do anything.”

Slan and his staff are most pleased with their ability to provide much higher service levels to store staff. “Our stores have noticed that the reliability of their technology is much higher,” Slan says. “They spend a lot less time with technology issues and more time managing their business. They don’t want to think about technology; they want to think about wine. System Center has really enabled us to be more proactive in the way we think about our business and freed up time for our staff to take on new projects that will move the business forward.”
 

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For more information about Total Wine & More products and services, call (301) 795-1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.totalwine.com