28.01.2015 Views

Lumber Liquidators - DataXstream

Lumber Liquidators - DataXstream

Lumber Liquidators - DataXstream

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

insiderprofiles.wispubs.com Reprinted with permission from the APR MAY JUN 2011 insiderprofiles


This article appeared in the APR MAY JUN 2011 issue <br />

of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com) <br />

and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.<br />

How <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> Optimized Its IT Investments<br />

and Lightened the Demand on Its IT Organization<br />

by David Hannon, Features Editor<br />

Rapid business growth is a double-edged sword. On one hand,<br />

all emerging enterprises surely aspire to grow and thrive. But<br />

keeping up with this expansion, especially from an infrastructure<br />

point of view, can be complex and expensive. In less than<br />

two decades, hardwood flooring retailer <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong><br />

grew from a single warehouse with no running water to<br />

a $600 million retailer with stores in 46 US states and more<br />

than 1,000 employees.<br />

In 2009, <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> planned to open 30–40<br />

new locations — and expected similar results for 2010. To<br />

accommodate this growth, the business required some major<br />

IT infrastructure changes. To this end, the business opted<br />

to implement a new ERP system, selecting SAP ERP for its<br />

functionality extending across finance, sales and operations,<br />

warehouse management, merchandising, and purchasing.<br />

Because the company was interested in a cost-efficient ERP<br />

system, the implementation team began an evaluation process<br />

to find a flexible server architecture that could handle its<br />

current requirements and also scale as the business continued<br />

to expand — especially in the areas of order capacity, transaction<br />

speed, reporting, and process automation.<br />

“Our goal was to deploy a solid and manageable foundation<br />

with the ability to scale,” says Jack Kinsey, Director of Network<br />

Operations at <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong>. “The message from the<br />

top of our company was to continue to deliver the way we’re<br />

delivering, but to keep an eye toward the future.”<br />

Moving to a Virtual Environment<br />

A conservative estimate from an internal cross-functional<br />

search committee showed that, to run a new ERP system, the<br />

company would need to triple its number of physical servers<br />

— and would then have to add more servers in the future as<br />

the landscape expanded.<br />

“We didn’t have a data center available in which we could<br />

put that much additional equipment while maintaining a<br />

reasonable reserve capacity,” Kinsey says, noting that the<br />

additional costs of either moving servers off site or making<br />

upgrades to its existing computer room weren’t particularly<br />

appealing to a company planning for long-term growth. And<br />

beyond the installation and housing of the physical servers,<br />

ongoing maintenance was a concern.<br />

For these reasons, the search committee recommended that<br />

<strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> move to a virtual environment. According<br />

to Kinsey, the following were identified as the key business<br />

drivers of going virtual:<br />

• Scalability. The business wanted a system that would not<br />

only meet its current needs, but scale with its long-term<br />

growth.<br />

• Physical space. Installing physical servers today, and in the<br />

future, would require that the company maintain enough<br />

physical space to accommodate a growing ERP system.<br />

• Maintenance and operations costs. Running and maintaining<br />

physical servers would require more investment<br />

— augmenting the company’s lean IT staff — than virtual<br />

servers would.<br />

• Expertise. The company hoped to capitalize on the inhouse<br />

experience it had, but also planned to seek virtualization<br />

help from an outside partner that would mesh well<br />

with the existing implementation team.<br />

After considering all of these factors — and implementation<br />

time — <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> decided to purchase all of<br />

the necessary equipment and software to begin a virtual ERP<br />

implementation, including VMware solutions, Dell servers<br />

and storage, and Microsoft operating systems. The environment<br />

was used throughout the project for all SAP systems —<br />

sandbox, training, development, and quality assurance — and<br />

that continues today, but with the addition of the production<br />

environment, which went live in August 2010.<br />

Because Kinsey had come to <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> in 2009<br />

from a company that had virtualized extensively, he understood<br />

the benefits and advantages of virtual implementations.<br />

To help with the project, the business partnered with<br />

<strong>DataXstream</strong>, a proponent of virtualization that, according<br />

to Kinsey, provided extensive expertise in virtualization for<br />

SAP environments. (For more information on the integral<br />

role <strong>DataXstream</strong> played in <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong>’ virtual<br />

implementation, refer to the sidebar on page 35.)<br />

insiderprofiles.wispubs.com Reprinted with permission from the APR MAY JUN 2011 insiderprofiles


All Photos Courtesy of <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong><br />

“During evaluation, implementation, and ongoing<br />

operations, having <strong>DataXstream</strong> on our side relieved<br />

a lot of pressure — because not only had they done<br />

it themselves, they were willing to put their stamp of<br />

approval on our virtualization project and provide examples<br />

of other companies that had been successful<br />

with virtualized SAP implementations,” Kinsey says. “A<br />

lot of our internal staff didn’t come from SAP shops, so<br />

it was a lot of change. Having <strong>DataXstream</strong> as such a<br />

proponent of virtualization relieved a lot of angst.”<br />

Reaping the Benefits of Virtualization<br />

While still in the early stages of its implementation,<br />

<strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> is seeing big benefits from its decision<br />

to go virtual. For starters, according to Kinsey,<br />

the ongoing maintenance and operation of a virtualized<br />

environment significantly lightens the demands<br />

on the internal IT organization. The reduction in<br />

physical servers and their related cooling systems<br />

reduces the maintenance requirements and costs.<br />

And the process of adding new servers is significantly<br />

streamlined in a virtualized environment. “We can<br />

provision additional servers for SAP installations in<br />

less than 30 minutes,” says Greg Hubof, Senior Basis<br />

Administrator at <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong>. “With a physical<br />

server, that process could take anywhere from two<br />

weeks to two months.” That benefit is particularly useful<br />

when it comes to ramping up additional servers<br />

for specific time-sensitive projects.<br />

Prior to this project, Hubof had been involved in<br />

several SAP implementations — but none in virtual<br />

environments. “When you get into data conversions<br />

with non-virtualized implementations, you always<br />

wish you had a little more horsepower,” he says. “With<br />

our new environment, we could — and did — spin up<br />

additional virtual machines temporarily while those<br />

data conversions were running, and then tore it down<br />

when the conversions were done.”<br />

Another example of the flexibility that comes<br />

with virtualization was the ability to create isolated<br />

research and testing environments using exact replicas<br />

of the servers running the SAP systems. This<br />

allowed multiple teams to work concurrently on different<br />

tasks on the “same” servers, while removing the<br />

insiderprofiles.wispubs.com Reprinted with permission from the APR MAY JUN 2011 insiderprofiles


<strong>DataXstream</strong>’s Virtualization<br />

Solution for <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong><br />

complexity of coordination between groups. In a<br />

physical environment, such accommodations are<br />

both costly and complicated, but in the virtual<br />

landscape, the IT team simply cloned the necessary<br />

servers and placed them in the isolated sandbox.<br />

“We were able to give the project team what it<br />

needed faster than would have been possible with<br />

physical hardware,” says Kinsey. “It’s a great example<br />

of the flexibility you have to flip machines around<br />

and make adjustments that are completely unrealistic<br />

in a physical environment.”<br />

Down the Virtual Road<br />

The most important benefits of the virtualized environment,<br />

according to Kinsey, are yet to come. Going<br />

forward, <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> can quickly and efficiently<br />

expand its IT landscape with greatly reduced<br />

concerns about where to put the servers and who<br />

will maintain them.<br />

At a Glance<br />

“We were able to give the<br />

project team what it needed<br />

faster than would have been<br />

possible with physical hardware.”<br />

— Jack Kinsey, Director of Network<br />

Operations, <strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong><br />

<strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong><br />

Headquarters: Toano, Virginia<br />

Industry: Hardwood flooring retailer<br />

Revenue: $620 million (2010)<br />

Employees: 1,000+<br />

Company details:<br />

• Founded in 1994 in a single warehouse<br />

• Now operates stores in 46 US states and will<br />

soon open stores in Canada<br />

• Opened 37 new stores in 2010, with 40–50<br />

planned in 2011<br />

• NYSE ticker: LL<br />

SAP solutions:<br />

• SAP for Retail<br />

• SAP NetWeaver BW<br />

• SAP NetWeaver Portal<br />

• SAP NetWeaver PI<br />

• SAP Solution Manager<br />

As an SAP systems integration and consulting firm<br />

with over 14 years of experience implementing SAP<br />

solutions, <strong>DataXstream</strong> specializes in the areas of integration,<br />

upgrades, virtualization, cloud computing,<br />

.NET Connector, SAP Solution Manager, and project<br />

management. <strong>DataXstream</strong>’s rare combination of<br />

project leadership, business process knowledge, and<br />

SAP technical expertise lets its clients achieve higher<br />

business performance and maximize their return<br />

on investment.<br />

<strong>Lumber</strong> <strong>Liquidators</strong> needed to deploy a hardware<br />

platform that would support not only the company’s<br />

initial implementation, but also future incremental<br />

growth. Because this would be a new implementation,<br />

the company was concerned with minimizing<br />

total cost, delivering high availability and consistent<br />

performance to an increasing number of users, and<br />

simplifying the system maintenance for its streamlined<br />

IT staff.<br />

Leveraging its longstanding expertise with SAP<br />

software, <strong>DataXstream</strong> tuned a virtualization solution<br />

specifically to support current SAP needs, while<br />

remaining flexible enough to grow incrementally as<br />

new deployment phases started. As a result, <strong>Lumber</strong><br />

<strong>Liquidators</strong> reduced the amount of hardware by<br />

two-thirds compared to a traditional solution, thereby<br />

lowering its TCO.<br />

Since 2002, <strong>DataXstream</strong> has leveraged the full<br />

flexibility and cost-saving features of virtualization to<br />

better meet the needs of its SAP customers. With a<br />

thorough understanding of virtualization technology<br />

coupled with SAP technical expertise, its experts have<br />

developed best-practice techniques to successfully<br />

architect SAP virtual storage infrastructures that can<br />

meet even the most rigid uptime and business continuity<br />

requirements.<br />

For more information, visit www.dataxstream.com.<br />

insiderprofiles.wispubs.com Reprinted with permission from the APR MAY JUN 2011 insiderprofiles

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!