Cintas, which rents uniforms and sells cleaning supplies, wanted to get into the document management business. The same route-management business model that brought supplies to customers could take away documents for scanning, container storage, or shredding. But Cintas needed a technology solution that provided high availability and disaster recovery of mission-critical documents, and that interoperated with its customers’ workflow processes for those documents. It found its answer in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software running on the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. Now, its solution can replicate transactions and massive file sizes across the WAN in seconds, and uses web services to interoperate workflow processes. These technologies make high-availability possible and provide the low total cost of ownership that helps Cintas price its service competitively.

Situation
You might think that a company that’s made its name in uniform rentals has little business managing a corporation’s most sensitive documents. But you’d be wrong. As Cintas tells it, the move not only makes perfect sense, but also means higher revenues and profits for the company, espe-cially during the tough economic times in which its newest business has been thriving.

Cintas has long been known as a provider of corporate uniforms and entrance mats, restroom cleaning and supplies, promotional products, first aid and safety products, and fire protection services. The company is very good at what it does, having grown to a U.S.$3.8 billion-a-year business employing 30,000 people and serving 800,000 customers throughout North America. Its core businesses have traditionally provided double-digit annual growth.

With SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve seen that 100 percent server uptime is now possible. Michael Kosegi Director of Business Technology, Cintas Document Management

And then the “Great Recession” hit. The difficult economy was especially challenging for Cintas. When the company’s customers reduced their workforces or closed facilities, the moves directly hit the company’s business lines. “If people are unemployed, they don’t wear our uniforms,” sums up Michael Kosegi, Director of Business Technology, Cintas Document Management.

Cintas continued to experience growth, but the rate slowed. Company executives knew that they would have to innovate, to offer new products and services not subject to the same business cycle, if Cintas were to continue to prosper, especially during hard economic times.

The company interacts with its customers on a frequent, regular basis as it makes deliveries of uniforms, cleaning supplies, and other products, and as it provides scheduled services. That customer touch provided a natural point from which to diversify its services. Cintas began its move into document management by using its route delivery expertise to transport customer documents to storage facilities and to provide shredding services. That business evolved into an archival document storage business in which Cintas scans and holds electronic copies of documents that customers might need at a later date.

As the company’s new business grew, so did the demands that customers put upon it. Cintas had to be able to scan and input thousands of documents into its database within hours, and it had to handle docu-ments of ever larger file sizes. For instance, computer-aided design files tens of mega-bytes in size had to be transportable over the Internet in real time. High availability was another concern, as customers wanted to rely on Cintas for management of increasingly mission-critical documents. Related to that, customers needed to know that Cintas had a failover and disaster recovery system that would protect the electronic copies of their documents even if the primary storage site went down.

Lastly, document retrieval was seldom a simple matter of producing a needed document. Customers would use their documents in various workflow processes, and Cintas had to provide workflow capa-bilities as well, to interoperate with its customers’ processes. High availability was crucial in this context, too, because any time documents were unavailable, workers at the customer site would be idled, waiting for them.

Solution
Cintas based its document management solution, which it called InfoPort, on technology it had gained through an acquisition. The InfoPort solution initially ran on the Windows Server 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 data management software.

How the Solution Works
The InfoPort workflow begins with the physical pickup of documents from the customer site by Cintas trucks and per-sonnel, and their delivery to a Cintas service bureau. There, documents are scanned at the rate of 200 to 300 pages per minute using a high-end Kodak scanner. Optical character-recognition processes extract indexing information and metadata from the documents. That information is stored in the SQL Server database; the images themselves are stored in the customer’s preferred format, using the Distributed File System (DFS) in Windows Server.

With data replication within seconds by SQL Server 2008, we’re not going to miss much if we have to rely on the failover site. Tim Blanton Manager of Imaging Systems, Cintas Document Management

Customers use the InfoPort web-based viewer to continually poll InfoPort over the Internet using web services, and to pull down metadata about their newly entered documents as that metadata becomes available. InfoPort also manages workflow processes with web services designed to interoperate with the customer’s own work-flow.

For example, InfoPort could use a workflow to pass invoice data to a customer’s accounts payable system for processing. When the customer needs the image of a document as well as its metadata, the customer’s software passes the document identifier back to the Cintas system, which runs a stored procedure to extract the image file from a storage unit attached to SQL Server. Another web service sends the image file over the Internet to the customer.

This system met the needs of Cintas and its customers, until those customers began to request a high-availability solution.

Growing Need for High Availability
As the needs for high availability and disaster recovery grew, Cintas explored the use of data replication over a wide-area network (WAN) from its primary site in Mason, Ohio, to a secondary site in Indianapolis, Indiana. If a server were temporarily unavailable at one site, customers could still be served by the second site; likewise, if data had to be restored at one location, the data at the second site would make this possible. To create this high-availability environment, Cintas deployed third-party replication software. But the choice proved less than optimal for Cintas.

“We found the software wasn’t completely reliable,” says Kosegi. “If there was a planned outage, it required a lot of handholding to ensure we could replicate everything.”

The software might report that a database had replicated, but, when Cintas tried to run it, the database was corrupted. Even when the replication worked, the process was delayed, wasting valuable time—time that Cintas and its customers didn’t have. Support for the software was spotty, according to Tim Blanton, Manager of Imaging Systems, Cintas.

Choosing Alternative Replication Software
As an alternative to the third party replication software, Cintas decided to upgrade to the current versions of the Microsoft technology it was already using. By moving InfoPort to SQL Server 2008 running on Windows Server 2008 R2, Cintas would gain capabilities it could exploit for high-speed replication across the WAN. Data mirroring in SQL Server 2008, for example, could help to ensure that any metadata or transactional information—such as a record of a web service requesting data—would replicate from Mason to Indianapolis quickly. Given that InfoPort handles about 3,200 transactions per minute, rapid replication of that data was essential to keep pace with new information entering the system. As it turned out, the version of DFS in Windows Server 2008 R2 could replicate the image files between the two sites with similar speed.

Cintas proved the value of SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 during a three-week proof of concept of the new architecture, which it conducted in November 2009. “Our tests showed that the replication speeds between our primary and failover sites were comparable to replication speeds within the primary data center,” says Blanton. “This was the solution we were looking for.”

Cintas began offering the high-availability document management service to its customers the following month.

Benefits
Cintas has succeeded in building the technology foundation for a new business in high-availability document management, a business meant to help steer the company through the treacherous waters of difficult economic times. Cintas sees superb availability and replication speed from its upgraded technologies, with low costs that support the competitive pricing the company needs to be successful.

Delivers 100 Percent Availability, Five-Second Replication over WAN
For the Cintas high-availability document management service to represent the new business opportunity that the company anticipates, it has to deliver rock-solid availability and performance. Cintas turned to SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to deliver these qualities. It scored on both counts, according to Kosegi. The use of data mirroring and DFS combine to deliver the high availability that Cintas sought.

With this technology backing us up, I’m more than confident we will exceed our customer’s expectations. Tim Blanton Manager of Imaging Systems, Cintas Document Management

“With SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, we’ve seen that 100 percent server uptime is now possible,” says Kosegi. “It makes us very confident when we offer our SLAs [service-level agreements].”

The other performance measure of interest to Cintas was the speed of data replication. The proof-of-concept measured replication over the WAN between the company’s two data centers at speeds that more than met the company’s requirements.

“With data replication within seconds by SQL Server 2008, we’re not going to miss much if we have to rely on the failover site,” says Blanton. “With this technology backing us up, I’m more than confident we will exceed our customer’s expectations.”

Lowers Total Cost of Ownership
Total cost of ownership is an important consideration for Cintas for two reasons. First, the company has to factor all costs into the price at which it offers its high-availability document management service. Naturally, it wants that price to be compe-titive, which means eliminating any extra-neous cost. Second, although Cintas is a $3.8 billion-a-year company, the Emerging Business unit that developed the document management service operates as an entre-preneurial organization. As such, costs had to be kept low.

Cintas has put the high-availability document management solution into production without expanding its IT staff by even a single person. Kosegi says he was impressed that upgrading InfoPort to SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 required minimal application changes, rather than the re-engineering he had expected and wanted to avoid. By reliably offering the availability and performance that Cintas requires, and without needing extra personnel to make that happen, the Microsoft technology helps meet the company’s need for low total cost of ownership and competitive pricing of its document management service.

Avoids Costs, Complexity, of Other Database Systems
That’s not true of other options to which Cintas could have turned, says Kosegi. For example, a solution based on other database software would have been an unreasonable cost burden, and only in part because of the difference in licensing costs. Says Kosegi, “Any time we introduce something that’s not Microsoft based, there are extra staffing issues. There are extra training issues. And there was no need to incur that cost.”

Blanton cites other ways in which SQL Server is easier to use than other database software, contributing to reduced development and maintenance time and, hence, lower cost. For example, he mentions the easier, more intuitive development environment for SQL Server, as well as tools such as the SQL Server Management Studio, which simplifies and speeds management tasks. Because SQL Server requires less training than alternatives, Cintas has more options in assigning existing staff to manage it. And because the third-party support environment is larger, Cintas has more options, at lower cost, for support.

“Microsoft delivered what we needed, with technology that was an understandable enhancement of the file and database technology we’ve been using for years,” Blanton concludes.

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers

For More Information
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For more information about Cintas products and services, call (800) CINTAS1 (246-8271) or visit the website at:
www.cintas.com