Pizza Hut was founded in 1958 in the U.S. and is a restaurant brand of Yum Brands. Since 1984, Pizza Hut has been present in Belgium, now as part of Top Brands, and realizes revenue of 60 million Euros on the Belgium market. Pizza Hut Belgium has 54 owned subsidiaries and tens of franchises with over 1700 employees. The headquarters of Pizza Hut is located in Antwerp, Belgium.The challenge – Create IT flexibility
Early 2009, Pizza Hut Belgium acquired Pizza Hut Delivery France from Yum Brands. This take-over tripled the size of the company in one stroke to over 160 locations and 3,500 employees. “We had reserved budget for selecting and building a new IT environment in France, that should become integrated with the existing environment in Belgium,“ said Jürgen Corstens, IT Director at Pizza Hut Belgium. “However, instead of creating a new IT environment somewhere in France, it seemed logical to centralize IT in Antwerp, Belgium and provide the French subsidiaries remote access to this infrastructure. The new IT environment should be flexible and scalable to be able to follow the growth of our organization. Pizza delivery is the fastest growing concept at Pizza Hut and we expect to open over 30 subsidiaries per year in Belgium and France during the next few years.”Implementing the Citrix solution
Pizza Hut does not have an internal IT staff and outsourced IT administration to Mobile Access NV, a Citrix Silver Solution Ad-visor, for many years. Mobile Access suggested using Citrix® XenApp™ to fill the need for centralization with server visualization and application actualization. Pizza Hut completely relied on the expertise of the partner and some references. In addition, the solution exactly matched the available budget. In the data-center from Pizza Hut in Antwerp, three new HP DL360 servers each equipped with 32GB memory and Citrix® XenServer™, Enterprise Edition were installed. To give this environment high availability and improve system administration, the organization added Citrix Essentials™ for XenServer™. The new servers for France and some servers for Belgium were defined on this visualized environment with Windows Server® 2003 and Windows Server 2008 workloads. The new XenApp environment runs on two servers, one visualized workload and one on the physical sever. A Net-app® SAN provides the necessary storage for the XenServer workloads.Old and new work seamlessly together
Pizza Hut does not upgrade or replace IT infrastructure components just for the process of renewal itself. When a technology works, there is often no need to upgrade and even one reason to upgrade is not sufficient. “We always look for the added-value for an investment and it should always save money. At Pizza Hut Belgium, we are very satisfied users of Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Server. Not so long ago, we upgraded our desktops from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows XP. The beauty of XenServer is that it enables older and proven technology can be visualized and co-exist on modern hardware. We have some applications that only run on Windows Server 2000. We can consolidate the server hardware while keeping the application and the operating system in production on a Windows 2000 Server workload on XenServer. XenServer brings us the flexibility to consolidate when is it is convenient for us. For example, for France we run Exchange 2007 and SQL Server 2005 workloads and for Belgium Exchange 2003 and SQL Server 2000 workloads, all on XenServer,” Corstens explains. The XenApp environment consists of two servers, of which one is visualized on XenServer and the other one is running on a physical server. Both work and integrate seamlessly in one farm. This is another example of a traditional machine working with a modern visualized environment.
Pragmatic strategy results in cost savings
The pragmatic approach in upgrading or replacing software or hardware only when it is really necessary saves Pizza Hut money. “We saw the opportunity to upgrade IT in Belgium using the investment we planned for France,” Corstens added. “We used the budget planned for France, to implement a new virtualized infrastructure in Belgium. With an additional 5.000 Euros we are now able to service the France as well as the Belgium subsidiaries from one location. By piggybacking Belgium on the investment made for France, we immediately saved 50.000 Euros that we would have spent in the next years to gradually upgrade the infrastructure in Belgium.” By installing the French infrastructure in Belgium, Pizza Hut was able to maintain the support and service levels from the existing Belgium IT partner. Because the company does not have an internal IT staff, this prevents the need for an additional partner in France and internal resources spent on two partners. In addition to cost savings for hardware and software, Pizza Hut saved on internal and especially in external man hours.
Pizza Hut steps into the twenty-first century
Pizza Hut is still in a transition phase. Many PCs run local applications, including Office 2000 in Belgium and a dedicated application for the French environment. In time, these will be consolidated and centralized on XenApp. The mission critical application accounting application at Pizza Hut already runs on the XenApp farm and is used in both countries. France also uses Office 2007 delivered by on XenApp. “We are now able to use our main application on every subsidiary in France and Belgium. Because it runs centralized, it is possible to use it on the PCs in France that are not yet consolidated and not even owned by us.” The addition of Citrix Essentials to the XenServer environment creates the perfect foundation for centralization. Thanks to the high availability that Citrix Essentials offers, it is not a problem when a physical server goes down. Citrix Essentials takes care of moving the workloads from the failed system to the remaining sufficient dimensioned hardware. In addition, creating new server workloads with XenServer is very easy and takes almost no time. This enables Pizza Hut to scale up the number of virtual servers and switch of physical systems when they reach their end-of-life. “The new environment initially seems overkill and, with 14 virtual servers, we have quite some overcapacity. But we needed to invest anyhow,“ concluded Corstens. “It was a deliberate choice based on future plans that guarantees scalability. Moving from the old to the new environment and opening new restaurants and pizza delivery centers becomes very easy. Thanks to the Citrix solutions, Pizza Hut steps into the twenty-first century, economic and budgetary justified.”
About Citrix
Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leading provider of virtual computing solutions that help companies deliver IT as an on-demand service. Founded in 1989, Citrix combines virtualization, networking, and cloud computing technologies into a full portfolio of products that enable virtual workstyles for users and virtual datacenters for IT. More than 230,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to help them build simpler and more cost-effective IT environments. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2009 was $1.61 billion.http://www.citrix.com/English/aboutCitrix/caseStudies/caseStudy.asp?storyID=2302253
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