Fashion retailer sets the trend in business agility

Situation

In business for more than 40 years, Nottingham-based Paul Smith is a preeminent British designer. The company has 14 different collections—produced in England and Italy—under the global Paul Smith brand. In addition to 17 shops in England, Paul Smith retail stores are found in fashion capitals around the world.

Supporting this British fashion success story is a global IT infrastructure managed by just 15 people in the Nottingham head office. The centralized IT model works on a multi-tier structure. There are three Tier 1 data centres; two sites in Nottingham and one in London. Tier 2 sites are branch offices in fashion capitals such as Paris, Milan, New York, and Tokyo. The company’s 35 retail stores form Tier 3.

“The role of IT at Paul Smith is foundational, yet transparent. It is behind everything that happens in our retail stores and everything we do to protect the integrity of our brand,” says Lee Bingham, Head of IT at Paul Smith. “IT at Paul Smith facilitates business growth and enables agility in responding to the market.”

Paul Smith opens three new stores a year on average and the demand for IT services from the business is growing. Employees expect IT to work all the time and to have ubiquitous access to information. The consumption of IT services is also dictated by the fashion industry’s seasonal activities: spring and fall collections and holiday retail sales. “We have to keep up with fluctuating demands for IT services depending on the time of year and profile of users,” says Bingham. “Our goal is to manage costs and improve service delivery, but we are challenged by an IT budget that doesn’t keep up with expectations from the business.”

To address this challenge, six years ago Paul Smith began defining a new approach to building its infrastructure and providing IT services to the business, while reducing server and data centre costs. It wanted to provide global services from a central location, simplify data centre administration, and automate manual tasks, in particular the provision of test and development environments. Paul Smith also needed to find less expensive and time-consuming ways to accommodate fluctuating demands in compute and storage requirements than simply adding more servers. To reduce unnecessary ‘midstream’ expenditures, the company wanted a better understanding of usage and improved capacity planning.

Business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) planning was another issue. While Paul Smith had processes in place to achieve its service level agreements, they were complex and manual. The company conducted one planned DR drill a year. Limited testing reduced the business’s level of assurance that services would be restored on time during a real crisis. The test itself required weeks of planning and took six people a whole day to complete, and there was always a possibility of service outages. “We could fail over the entire data center between our Tier 1 sites, but the process wasn’t granular enough to give us the ability to define automated processes for individual applications,” says Bingham. “We wanted to classify our applications according to their relative importance to the business, and design our failover plans accordingly.”

Solution

To achieve these goals, Paul Smith aligned itself with Microsoft. Beginning in 2008 with the Windows Server 2008 operating system, Paul Smith has worked with Microsoft to take advantage of the latest virtualization, cloud computing, and data center management solutions. To help standardize on Microsoft technologies, Paul Smith partners with risual, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network with Gold competencies. Together, the companies are building an IT infrastructure that delivers ongoing business value.

“Microsoft offers an interoperable suite of foundational server and data center technologies that we trust,” says Bingham. “Microsoft products are interoperable and they are always developing. We have done very well aligning our IT strategies along with their evolution.”

Embracing Virtualisation

When Paul Smith deployed the Windows Server 2008 operating system, it consolidated its data centers and began to deliver more centralised IT services. After upgrading to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and Hyper-V virtualisation technology, the company significantly reduced its server count, decreased its carbon footprint, and lowered data centre costs.

“The benefits of virtualisation—reduced operational costs and increased agility in provisioning and migrating virtual machines to respond to the business—continue to evolve as Paul Smith updates to new versions of Windows Server,” says Richard Proud, a Director at risual. “By the time it deployed Windows Server 2012, Paul Smith had made significant headway in virtualizing high-performance workloads, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Cognos.”

Building Private Clouds

Paul Smith also used Windows Server 2012 to build private clouds and deployed Microsoft System Centre 2012 data centre management tools to manage them. The company used these technologies to build dynamic data centre and cloud infrastructures with more flexible workloads and automated processes. IT staff used features in Hyper-V that promote virtual machine mobility, such as simultaneous live migration to speed up server maintenance and reduce downtime.

“Building private clouds means that IT staff can enable a more responsive, on-demand allocation of pooled IT resources—such as applications, networks, servers, storage, and services,” says Bingham. “We can be more agile in responding to increasingly sophisticated end-user requirements through self-service capabilities and automation, delivering IT services in a dynamic, proactive way that aligns with business needs.”

And with Windows Server 2012, Paul Smith worked with risual to introduce global DR capabilities. The teams upgraded the hypervisors at Tier 2 sites to Windows Server 2012 and used Hyper-V Replica to replicate business-critical virtual machines back to its Tier 1 data centres. Hyper-V Replica is a feature of Windows Server 2012 that provides a storage-agnostic and workload-agnostic solution that replicates virtual machines over IP-based networks.

Now, with the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system and System Centre 2012 R2, Paul Smith can focus on improving IT service delivery to the business. The company will use the Orchestrator and Service Manager components of System Centre 2012 to introduce a self-service portal for IT services, such as provisioning servers. System Centre 2012 R2 will also be used to automate manual tasks such as starting, stopping, and monitoring systems using runbooks (which contain instructions for an automated task), and to streamline change management processes in the data centre.

Introducing Hybrid Cloud Computing

Paul Smith will use Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Centre 2012 R2 to introduce hybrid cloud computing to the business. A hybrid cloud combines private cloud computing with a public cloud located outside the enterprise data centre. For Paul Smith, that external public cloud is Windows Azure, a cloud platform that provides on-demand compute, storage, content delivery, and networking capabilities from Microsoft data centres. Paul Smith can choose whether to build new environments and deploy applications on-premises or in Windows Azure, based on business needs.

“Microsoft development efforts are now ‘cloud-first,’ a strategy we totally agree with,” says Proud. “Paul Smith can take operational flexibility a step further by using Windows Azure as an additional environment for computing where it only pays for the virtual machines it uses.”

To achieve seamless operations across private and public clouds and to manage its hybrid cloud environments, Paul Smith can use System Centre 2012 R2. With a hybrid cloud solution from Microsoft, IT staffers can easily move existing applications between its on-premises environment and Windows Azure without having to change networking, security policies, or operational processes.

Hybrid cloud computing is also an integral factor in the new DR capabilities within Windows Server 2012 R2. The latest version of Hyper-V Replica offers flexible replication intervals for application workloads and adds the possibility of replicating virtual machines to a third site. Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager incorporates a cloud-based administration console to orchestrate DR plans for specific
applications and works with the Virtual Machine Manager component of System Center 2012. Paul Smith IT staffers can assign individual applications a priority level according to business requirements, and use Hyper-V Recovery Manager to orchestrate an automated DR plan that coordinates the replication and recovery sequence for each application at the secondary data center, based on their relative importance to the business. And because Hyper-V Recovery Manager is delivered via a control panel in the Windows Azure Management Portal, it is available to Paul Smith IT staffers as long as they have an Internet connection.

Also, Paul Smith is using StorSimple, a cloud-integrated storage solution from Microsoft that works with Windows environments, to create a hybrid cloud storage solution that uses the Windows Azure environment. Paul Smith generates a lot of design data in its London office, and it is using StorSimple to protect and copy that data to Windows Azure storage. The company is also using StorSimple to manage the amount of data that resides in its data centers.

“Prior to StorSimple, Paul Smith simply added more and more storage to accommodate growing data,” says Proud. “Now they are using StorSimple to create policies that archives data to Windows Azure storage if it hasn’t been accessed in 12 months.”

Paul Smith will be deploying Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 in early 2014 at its Tier 1 data centers in the United Kingdom.

Using Cloud-Based Productivity Tools

Paul Smith also takes advantage of Microsoft cloud services for its business productivity platform. Approximately 500 employees in office and retail environments are using Microsoft Office 365, which provides a single, managed, and highly secure platform to access line-of-business systems and services direct from the retail shop floor, as opposed to employees using PCs in locked back offices.

“Office 365 provides excellent flexibility and scalability across the entire global network, and gives us key Microsoft Office functionality on Windows 8.1 tablets in our stores,” says Bingham. “The combination of Office 365 and Windows-based mobile devices, which can be used on the shop floor by the sales team in the customer environment, is a very strong proposition. A mobile device in sales assistants’ hands helps customers bridge the physical and digital gap, driving better sales and shopping experience and improving upsell and cross sell opportunities.”

Benefits

Over the past five years, Paul Smith has built an agile, reliable, and cost-effective global IT infrastructure that uses the latest virtualization and cloud computing technologies from Microsoft. Along the way, the IT department at Paul Smith has evolved into an effective business partner, providing expedient IT services and proactive support to help the company grow. “Paul Smith’s business rests on Microsoft technologies because they deliver great value,” says Bingham. “There’s no other vendor that could work with us in the same way and deliver the same benefits.”

Optimizes the Infrastructure

With Windows Server and Hyper-V virtualization technologies, Paul Smith architected an IT infrastructure that aligns better with the business. The company has all the virtual cores, virtual memory, and storage that it needs, even for its most intensive workloads, such as Cognos, which currently performs 10 percent faster compared to running on a physical server. Today, Paul Smith has virtualized 80 percent of its servers and it has room for more than 1,000 virtual machines. “We have future-proofed the data center for the next three years,” says Bingham.

Paul Smith is also using Hyper-V to increase virtual machine density and derive more value from hardware by running more workloads faster. It has increased density by almost 200 percent, from 28 virtual machines per host server to 83 virtual machines per host server.

Improves Business Agility, Service Predictability

When it deployed Windows Server 2012, Paul Smith enabled business agility by virtualizing its data centers. With the capability of migrating hundreds of virtual machines at one time, the company can move more quickly to respond to business needs. “We are saving approximately 24 hours if we need to migrate an entire set of virtual machines from one data center to another,” says Bingham. “And compared to the physical environment, when we virtualize our servers, we save four weeks in provisioning time.”

Today, Paul Smith is embracing the Microsoft hybrid cloud computing vision to take business agility to the next level. IT staff will extend Paul Smith computing environments to run in Windows Azure—a less expensive, more expedient way of acquiring compute, storage, and networking resources than building on-premises environments. “Paul Smith has the luxury of deciding where it can best deliver its IT services,” says Proud. “This adds a layer of sophistication to the environment that they never had before.”

For example, Paul Smith can use StorSimple to make decisions about where to store design data: on-premises or in the Windows Azure environment. “It’s about efficient data archiving: maximizing the
capacity that we’ve got within the data center and leveraging the cloud,” says Bingham. “From an end user perspective, it’s no different: if you need a file, StorSimple retrieves it from Windows Azure and makes it available in the local data center.”

The company can also accommodate spikes in service requests in the production environment around the holiday retail season. “With Window Azure, we can scale up our resources on demand, for example, to send out 10 million emails in the single month of December,” says Bingham. “Or we can accommodate spikes in demand for business intelligence when monitoring sales and other performance metrics following the opening of a new store.”

Reduces Costs

Thanks to virtualization and increased server density, Paul Smith reduced hardware acquisition and maintenance costs by £840,000 (US$1.4 million), according to figures compiled for the first year it deployed Windows Server 2012.

And by embracing the hybrid cloud computing model, the company expects ongoing infrastructure savings. Purchasing compute, storage, and networking resources in the cloud is less expensive than building them on-premises, especially when the resources are required on an intermittent basis. “Now we have the option to say, ‘Do we invest in some HP servers, or do we just buy computing resources from Windows Azure,” says Bingham. “Hybrid cloud computing really does give us the ability to tailor our infrastructure so that we can provide more services, more quickly, at less cost.”

Also, budgeting for IT services is simplified because IT staff can easily monitor the compute, storage, and network resources that it consumes on Windows Azure for different IT projects or for cyclical increases in demands for IT resources, such as when the company introduces new collections in the fall and spring. “If we know that every fall we’ll use the flexible resources of Windows Azure to handle requests for data, we can introduce more predictability in our annual spending request and help the financial operations team with its budgets,” says Bingham. “We can also reduce the chance of panic IT buying midterm to accommodate spikes in demand.”

Enhances Disaster Recovery Capabilities

When Paul Smith started using Windows Server and Hyper-V as a foundation for its business continuity strategy, it reduced its recovery time objective from 48 hours to 5 minutes. “We don’t need to build high-availability architecture at global branch sites; instead we can get the same level of availability and maximize service quality by using Hyper-V Replica at 50 percent of the cost,” says Bingham.

The company will use Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper-V Replica, and Hyper-V Recovery Manager to benefit even more from a cloud-integrated DR solution. “We conduct tests to refine our business continuity plans in Hyper-V Recovery Manager, which runs in Windows Azure, as frequently as we want,” says Bingham. “This will give a new level of comfort to the business, especially around Tier 1 applications that directly influence the company’s ability to generate revenue or that protect the integrity of our brand through consistent, always available, quality service in the stores and online.”

Automates Processes and Enables Self-Serve IT

Paul Smith IT intends to use Windows Azure to expedite in-house web development through self-serve capabilities for web developers. Instead of provisioning on-premises test and development environments, IT staff will use Windows Azure and System Center 2012 to provide web developers with a self-serve portal so they can provision their own test and development environments running in the cloud.

“We have already identified 25 processes that we can automate using System Center,” says Bingham. “Looking back over the past six years, there are so many examples of how we have used Microsoft technologies to our advantage. In fact, I don’t think there’s been any request from the business that we haven’t been able to accomplish.”