Manufacturing Customer Story – Andrew Peller Limited

Written by Erin Brennan

July 22, 2016

Background:

Andrew Peller Limited is a Canadian-based premium wine manufacturer which owns and operates both vineyards and over 100 retail locations. Award-winning wine brands include Peller Estates, Trius, and Hillebrand.

Challenge:

For over a decade Andrew Peller Limited made extensive use of Citrix technologies which has enabled them to deliver applications and information to branch and retail locations, and to streamline integration resulting from acquisitions. As they continued to grow, they were facing increasing pressure to deliver new applications to all employees and their current setup put them at risk of server ‘downages’. Third Octet has been Andrew Peller’s IT arm for around 8 years. As the company’s leases for current equipment approached expiration, CIO Stuart Tyler and Third Octet realized the timing was right for Andrew Peller Limited to revisit its IT strategy and design and implement a new one that would solve their current challenges and scale with their future needs.

Approach:

Third Octet follows a proven six step methodology approach to determine the best solution for implementation and end user managed services, if required, for our clients.

Solution:

Faced with increasing demands to support content-rich applications and personal cloud requirements, Andrew Peller Limited and Third Octet recognized the benefits that virtualization and a centralized, single delivery strategy could bring.

CIO Stuart Tyler and Third Octet decided to build a parallel Citrix infrastructure from the ground up to support the more than 400 end users with one, company-wide delivery strategy, with Third Octet having responsibilities for the complete architecture, implementation, and migration strategy. Third Octet also defined a staged-migration strategy to simplify the transition to the new infrastructure, operating the old and new infrastructure transition to the new infrastructures in parallel.

Results

Lower costs, full mobility, streamlined processes and reduced administrative burden were achieved through the design and implementation. IT can now provision hundreds of desktops or scale the environment back at a moment’s notice. The provisioning method enables all deployed desktops to be centrally managed from a single virtual desktop image, allowing IT to instantly deploy applications and security patches to all desktops. Additionally, each desktop is delivered in a read-only state – user-specific changes (such as defining wallpapers, adjusting preferences and, in some situations, installing applications) are captured and stored within a profile that travels with the user, desktop-to-desktop (in a personal cloud). Third Octet also defined high-availability across all stacks within the Citrix infrastructure and, importantly, outside of the Citrix infrastructure, including load-balancing multiple Microsoft Exchange servers through Citrix NetScaler appliances. The new infrastructure avoids all single points of failure and strives to achieve 99.99% availability.

 

It was a very collaborative approach. We knew we could rely on Third Octet for guidance and to execute seamlessly on the strategy. We rebuilt the entire facility from the ground up, in parallel to the existing environment, encompassing directory services, messaging, business applications, WAN infrastructure, file and print services, and more. Third Octet defined the delivery strategy and helped us with hardware scoping, obtaining buy-in from other executives, as well as managing the implementation.

– Stuart Tyler, Director of IT for Andrew Peller Limited, speaking to a design and implementation of Citrix XenDesktop.

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