Many businesses take the opportunity afforded by moving premises to upgrade their IT infrastructure. In the case of Nissan Ireland, the Hyper-V virtualization technology in Windows Server 2008 allows it to test upgrades in a safe environment ahead of the move, while allowing the company’s IT team to focus on strategic objectives for the business.
Situation
Nissan Ireland is responsible for distributing the full range of Nissan cars, commercial vehicles and forklifts within the Republic of Ireland. The company directly employs 80 people and its 55-strong dealer network employs more than 1,000 staff. Nissan’s Irish operation has the company’s highest cumulative market share in Europe. From a strategic standpoint, IT is very important to Nissan Ireland. “It’s very much an enlightened IT division here. It’s not the usual IT manager of five or ten years ago who was purely reactive,” explains Rory Donnelly, chief information officer with Nissan Ireland. “Within Nissan, the CIO is expected to understand the business as well as any other departmental manager, because it’s impossible to make informed decisions about platforms and systems that we would migrate to going forward without knowing the business needs for them.”
The company made a choice to roll out Microsoft technology extensively throughout its operations, to make the best use of a relatively small IT department which includes just one network administrator who oversees the infrastructure within Nissan and at its 55 dealer sites. “It’s quite a significant workload for one person so we wanted to use tools that provide easier ways of doing work,” Donnelly outlines. “Obviously we’re familiar with Microsoft environments, so we said let’s look at Microsoft system tools so that we’ll be familiar with the environment, there’s no learning curve and they integrate with the systems we already have.” Nissan had seen some significant improvements being designed into Windows Server 2008 and was keen to become an early adopter and take advantage of these improvements. The IT department felt that by implementing Server 2008 technologies would allow it to concentrate on more business-oriented projects rather than reactive and non-value-adding issues.
Donnelly says there were several requirements the new systems had to meet: easy deployment of new desktops in the company’s new premises; easy server deployment for R&D; reduction of the physical number of servers, the management overhead and associated power consumption/cooling requirement.
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Benefits
Reduced cost of ownership
As part of the virtualisation strategy, Nissan Ireland will reduce the number of physical servers it needs. “Currently we have 18 physical servers, but after our move, that will reduce to eight. Thereafter we will further test and virtualize other servers as time allows,” says Donnelly.
Time saved
According to Donnelly, the desktop deployment programme will allow the IT staff to reduce significantly the time spent troubleshooting. “Historically, desktop issues could take hours to find, whether it be due to some registry corruption or software incompatibility. With Server 2008, Group Policy and Vista Enterprise x64, we can manage that in 30 minutes max. The rule is ‘if it can’t be fixed in 15 minutes, re-image’. This allows us to make better use of the resources within the department for more business-oriented purposes.”
Ease of management
Bill O’Brien, business group lead, server and tools with Microsoft Ireland, points out the advantages of having a single management console to support the IT infrastructure. “If you look at someone that has a lot of Microsoft technology and is using our management tool System Centre, it can manage the physical and the virtual, so they make the decision about what’s right to be running on a dedicated server and what’s right to be virtual and they still have the same management suite. They’re not going out to buy a solution to cover virtualisation. Microsoft’s technology is well integrated and gives customers great choice in that area – plus, it’s very cost-effective.”
More effective use of resources
Rolling out intranet-based training for users has allowed the IT staff to step back from first-level support to being more focused on operations. “If we can start using tools that mean we can make better use of our nine to five jobs in IT in terms of maintaining these systems and keeping them up and running and available, we’ll deploy them,” Donnelly declares. “It’s all about making the best use of the resources that you have. We have all this extra technology and we have the same wage bill. We’ve actually got less staff in IT than we had in 2000 and it’s not because we have less to do.”
Flexible technology for the future
“The payback to the business will be the drive towards dynamic IT – one that gives great flexibility, cost savings and is easier to manage. Your IT department will be able to do the business projects that you want because they’re running a very efficient IT, freeing up time and resources,” says O’Brien.
Removing risk from new IT rollouts
Donnelly is clearly enthused by the technology at his disposal. “This is a core part our toolkit going forward. To be honest, I can’t see us upgrading any system anywhere in this organisation without first testing it out in a virtual environment. Why would you miss out on that and take the added risk of potentially running into problems on the physical box when you could mitigate all the risks in a virtual environment?” he asks.
Summary
Donnelly says Nissan’s new technology infrastructure brings many benefits. “The ability to sleep easier at night is a great one,” he quips. “Knowing that your data is secure and reliable is worth its weight in gold. Being able to meet the daily requirements of the business in terms of ad-hoc requests for new and innovative projects proves that our decision to move forward with Microsoft was the right one. Having a platform that will support us in the longer term is also vital, especially in the current economic climate.” Having presided over many operating system refreshes, Donnelly says Server 2008 and Vista have more than exceeded his expectations. “I believe that the gains of this move exceed those of any previous upgrade we have done. If you want to stay where you are, then do nothing. But if you want to keep your competitive edge, increase productivity and have the infrastructure to cater for the unknown, then yes, I would definitely recommend it.”
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© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published May 2008
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