Power Mobility Equipment Supplier Increases Business Agility with Virtualized IT Solution

Power Mobility Equipment Supplier Increases Business Agility with Virtualized IT Solution

Overview Country or Region: United States

Industry: Retail Customer Profile Based in New Braunfels, Texas, with 60 distribution centers in 47 states and more than 1,300 employees, The SCOOTER Store is the leading supplier of power mobility devices in the United States. Business Situation To save money, take pressure off its IT staff, and better align its IT infrastructure with its dynamic business needs, The SCOOTER Store needed to consolidate its physical IT environment. Solution The SCOOTER Store deployed Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to make its IT infrastructure a more dynamic strategic asset for the enterprise.

Benefits
ï® Increased agility
ï® Reduced costs
ï® Decreased downtime
ï® Better business value

“We have to be able to change our computer systems to support our fluid business process. With Microsoft virtualization software, we’re able to meet that challenge.” Barrett Blake, Infrastructure Architect, The SCOOTER Store.

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With a nationwide network of distribution centers and service specialists, The SCOOTER Store is the leading supplier of power mobility devices in the United States. Since 1991, The SCOOTER Store has helped more than 300,000 people with mobility challenges lead full, self-sufficient lives. The company must maintain agile and flexible IT systems to stay in compliance with changing government mandates, manage accelerating growth, provide comprehensive service to its customers, and administer its distribution, sales, and billing. To save money and better align its IT infrastructure with its business needs, The SCOOTER Store needed to consolidate its physical IT environment. The SCOOTER Store deployed Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to make its IT infrastructure a more dynamic strategic asset for the enterprise.

Situation
The Scooter Store, based in New Braunfels, Texas, is the leading supplier of power mobility devices in the United States, with 60 locations in 47 states and a nationwide network of service specialists. Since 1991, The SCOOTER Store has worked with approximately 100,000 physicians across the U.S. to help more than 300,000 people with limited mobility maintain their personal independence. The average age of The SCOOTER Store’s customer base is 72. As the American baby-boom generation reaches retirement age over the next decade, The SCOOTER Store expects to see accelerating growth.

To manage that growth and stay in compliance with ever-changing government mandates for documentation, reporting, consumer safety, and patient privacy, the company must maintain agile and flexible IT systems. In addition, The SCOOTER Store relies on a large and comprehensive IT environment to help it provide consultations to doctors and patients, and to manage distribution, sales, and billing. To keep up with changing business requirements, The SCOOTER Store needs to continually develop new applications and adjust its IT infrastructure, which creates several challenges for the company. The first challenge is to meet the company goal of maximizing network uptime. “We have a goal of 99 percent uptime and zero unplanned downtime,” says Barrett Blake, Infrastructure Architect at The SCOOTER Store. “An outage of our production network can cost as much as $150,000 an hour.”

While The SCOOTER Store could and did work hard to avoid network downtime, it had a harder time avoiding the costs of an IT environment that was growing ever larger and more complex. “We were putting a new server in place every time we had to deploy a new application, so you can imagine how the proliferation of servers grew as new demands for IT services came in,” says Jay Greene, Senior Vice President for Information Technology at The Scooter Store. “With every new server we installed we had to acquire new software licensing or adjust our con-tracts. That added a significant amount of cost to the equation.” The SCOOTER Store needed to reduce the hardware costs and time-intensive labor associated with the administration, provisioning, and maintenance of its physical machines. The company also wanted to set up a mirrored staging and integration environment to develop and test new applications while minimizing downtime. To save money, take pressure off the IT staff, and better align its IT infrastructure with the company’s evolving business needs, The SCOOTER Store realized it needed to consolidate its physical server environment. “We’ve had to grow by leaps and bounds,” says Dan Gibbens, Executive Vice President of Marketing at The SCOOTER Store. “And the IT systems that we had in place and the way we had our servers configured were real business constraints for us.” Solution The SCOOTER Store determined that virtualization would be the key to providing maximum business agility. The company recognized that virtualization of its physical IT infrastructure would create a more dynamic and more flexible environment, making IT a better strategic asset, able to scale and grow any time the company was ready.

The company began evaluating several virtualization solutions including VMware ESX Server, Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007. After considering each of the options it evaluated, The SCOOTER Store
“We chose the Microsoft solution over the competition because of the cost savings. Also, while VMware offered a great solution, it didn’t give us the holistic approach for managing our environment that Microsoft did.” Richard Webster, Manager of Systems and Storage, The SCOOTER Store
decided to deploy a Microsoft virtualization and management solution.

A critical factor in The SCOOTER Store’s decision was cost. According to Greene, the VMware solution could have cost The SCOOTER Store up to U.S.$500,000 in software and hardware expenses, not to mention ongoing costs associated with support contracts and upgrades, features that were already integrated into the Microsoft offerings. Another factor was the integrated and familiar technologies in the Microsoft solution. “We chose the Microsoft solution over the competition because of the cost savings,” says Richard Webster, Manager of Systems and Storage at The SCOOTER Store. “Also, while VMware offered a great solution, it didn’t give us the holistic approach for managing our environment that Microsoft did.” Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager, The SCOOTER Store converted 52 machines to 13 physical servers running 40 to 50 virtual servers with Virtual Server 2005. Then the IT staff created a virtual test/ development environment that The SCOOTER Store calls its integration network, where it can develop applications before moving them to its production network. “We created an integration network where we could develop and demonstrate application changes and what effects they would have on the produc-tion network before making the change,” says Blake. “Virtualization helped us to build that network environment and keep it up and running.”

Once The SCOOTER Store became familiar with the new technology, it began replacing some of its production environment with virtual machines. The company uses System Center Virtual Machine Manager to automatically provision and load balance servers, so that if one server is experiencing high use, its functions can be switched to another server with lower use. “We use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage every virtual machine throughout our environment,” says Webster. “SCVMM also allows us to migrate our applications supported by legacy hardware onto virtual machines with minimal effort and downtime.” By integrating Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 with its infrastructure virtualization, The SCOOTER Store can monitor its servers and applications, providing a complete view of the health of its IT environment and enabling it to respond rapidly to disruptive events. The SCOOTER Store has a comprehensive vision for the future of its IT resources that is centered on virtualization.

“Our future plans include using virtualization to create a dynamic data center at The Scooter Store, continually increasing our performance with each virtual machine,” says Webster. Looking forward, The SCOOTER Store is evaluating the Hyper-V™ technology in the Windows Server® 2008 operating system to increase the performance of its virtualization strategy. With Hyper-V, The SCOOTER Store will be able to consolidate multiple server roles as separate virtual machines on a single physical machine, and if necessary, run multiple operating systems on a single server. “Hyper-V is very exciting for us because it is integrated and designed into the operating system,” says Blake. “We’ll be able to do much more with each physical piece of hardware.”

Benefits
By deploying Microsoft virtualization and management solutions, The SCOOTER Store has developed the ability to make ongoing, real-time changes to its existing IT systems,
“We have 13 physical servers doing what 52 servers used to do. We’re talking about saving $150,000 worth of physical hardware and that doesn’t include the power requirements for them.” Barrett Blake, Infrastructure Architect, The SCOOTER Store

providing the company with extreme business agility. The company has enhanced the reliability and security of its IT infrastructure while making it more flexible. It has also re-duced its IT costs significantly and increased the efficiency and productivity of its IT staff.

Now The SCOOTER Store can easily and rapidly respond to changes in government compliance mandates, meet its dynamic business challenges, maintain the leadership position in its industry, and continue to improve the quality of life for its customers. “We have to be able to change our computer systems to support our fluid business process,” says Blake. “With Microsoft virtualization software, we’re able to meet that challenge.” Increased Agility By using virtualization, The SCOOTER Store can scale its systems overnight. Where before, changing or developing new applications meant acquiring new hardware and installing more servers, now changes can be made more efficiently and the entire infrastructure is more scalable and agile. “Building a new server in our virtual integration network takes about 30 minutes max,” says Blake. “It used to take a half a day to build a physical system.”

Like many high-growth companies, The SCOOTER Store has to make the most of its limited resources, which it has been able to do effectively by employing virtualization. “We always have to think long and hard about where we put our resources,” says Gibbens. “We’ve always put it into technology because we knew that would allow us to be agile enough to respond to the business oppor-tunities that came our way."

Reduced Costs
According to The Scooter Store, consolidating and reducing the number of servers in its IT environment is saving the company between $150,000 and $200,000 in IT hardware costs, and the company is increasing its return on investment by 50 percent. “We have 13 physical servers doing what 52 servers used to do,” says Blake. “We’re talking about saving $150,000 worth of physical hardware and that doesn’t include the power requirements for them.” “Previously we would buy a single server to run a single application,” says Webster. “With virtualization, we’re able to load multiple applications on a single server, saving money we can dedicate to other aspects of The SCOOTER Store.” In addition to hardware costs, The SCOOTER Store is saving the equivalent of one to two full-time employees in administrative overhead by using Microsoft virtualization and management solutions. “With Microsoft virtualization solutions, we’re able to keep the IT department lean and reduce the cost in FTEs,” says Webster. Decreased Downtime

By developing a complete virtual replica of its production environment in its integration net-work and creating a testing, staging, and integration environment, The SCOOTER Store can maximize the uptime of its production network while it develops new applications to meet changing business needs. “In the production network we are meeting our 99 percent uptime goal on a regular basis,” says Blake.

Better Business Value

The SCOOTER Store has lowered its total cost of ownership and reduced IT overhead by implementing virtualization. Beyond the significant cost savings, The SCOOTER Store is also meeting its overall goal of making its IT resources an asset to the enterprise, rather than just a cost. “IT shops are often more a cost center than they are aligned with the
“With virtualization we are making IT more dynamic and more of a strategic asset for the business, which allows us the agility to change and grow.” Richard Webster, Manager of Systems and Storage, The SCOOTER Store.

Business to help it grow, and we wanted to change that,” says Webster. “With virtuali-zation we are making IT more dynamic and more of a strategic asset for the business, which allows us the agility to change and grow.”

Microsoft Virtualization Microsoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.