Brown-Forman Corporation

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Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Brown-Forman Company is one of the largest American-owned spirits and wine companies and is among the top 10 largest global spirits companies. The company sells its brands in more than 135 countries, and employs 4,440 people worldwide.

In 2007, pressures to reduce costs while keeping pace with increasing data demands drove Brown-Forman to assess its IT environment and ensure that it was operating at optimum efficiency. Metrics revealed surprisingly low server utilization — only 10% on average. Brown-Forman management challenged its IT team to not only maximize utilization of existing resources, but also to increase capacity to accommodate the company's growing application and data demands — all while decreasing its environmental footprint and operating costs.

The IT department determined that the best way to meet those demands would be to adopt a virtualization strategy for the company's SAP solution-based datacenter. Virtualization would allow the company to consolidate resources for a smaller, more energy-efficient landscape, and increase capacity. The IT team found that the only virtualization solution SAP supported in a production environment — and the only solution not requiring IT retooling — was the proven, market-tested Solaris Containers technology from Sun.

Brown-Forman has been using the Solaris Operating Systems since 1998, so moving to the Solaris 10 Operating System was a natural progression. The Solaris 10 OS offers virtualization features such as Solaris Containers and the Solaris ZFS file system. Solaris Containers help consolidate, isolate, and protect thousands of applications on a single server; integration with Solaris ZFS allows multiple Solaris Containers to consume a minimal disk footprint by using ZFS snapshots.

The company's SAP solution-based architecture followed the SAP best practice of devoting a system (one or more servers) to each of four usages: sandbox, development, QA, and production. As part of its strategy to virtualize the entire SAP landscape, the IT team began by virtualizing the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application. The Brown-Forman IT team used Solaris Containers and Solaris ZFS to consolidate four SAP CRM-based environments onto two servers — one Sun Fire V490 server for production and one virtualized Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server for non-production purposes. Within one instance of the Solaris 10 OS, each container can behave like an individual server.

Through a recent acquisition, Brown-Forman had also inherited DB2 software running on an IBM AS400 machine. The IT team needed to retain the acquired company's data for legal reasons, but without the prohibitive cost of maintaining the legacy hardware. The system ran on an outdated version of SAP software that was unable to run on the Solaris 10 OS but could run on the Solaris 9 OS. To solve that problem, IT created a container running the Solaris 9 OS on a Solaris 10 OS server and imported the legacy data into the container.

By using Sun virtualization technology, Brown-Forman was able to increase its capacity without increasing server sprawl. Instead of using dedicated servers with different environments running different applications, virtualization has enabled the company to combine environments and consolidate servers.

On the SAP CRM non-production server, containers now provide three isolated execution environments: sandbox, development, and QA. On the virtualized server, utilization more than doubled.

In the case of the acquisition, the company was able to eliminate the legacy equipment, avoiding potentially costly hardware maintenance, and still retain the data as legally required.

Brown-Forman found that the flexibility of containers reduces the risk of implementing changes and upgrades. It can create containers for on-the-fly sandbox space, providing a safe environment for experimenting with and testing new SAP applications. It can also create containers to address specific issues safely while using resources effectively. For instance, when extra capacity was needed to run BI month-end batch processes, the company's IT team created a container on the fly on an existing server and increased capacity without having to add a physical server to the datacenter. Additionally, the IT team can deploy new features faster to help the company respond with agility to rapidly changing market demands.

Using Solaris Containers and Solaris ZFS helped the company cut costs immediately by reducing downtime for data recovery and keeping IT development projects on-track. Before, data was recovered from tape, which caused as much as one day of downtime for offsite programmers. Now, at major milestones, the IT team uses the Solaris ZFS snapshot capability and Solaris Containers to capture the current state of the environment. If an error occurs, the IT team can recover data from the snapshot almost instantly. With close to zero downtime, projects continue on schedule, and programmers are more productive.

Brown-Forman plans to virtualize a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server to house its SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) and SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM) applications. Over time, with upcoming server upgrades and more virtualization, the company expects to consolidate 29 servers into 9, cut the datacenter footprint in half, and increase ROI. The IT department anticipates it will gain floor space and see significant savings in heating, cooling, administration, training, and maintenance costs, as well as greater efficiency and cost savings for non-SAP applications running on the Solaris OS.