Windows Server 2008 R2Customer Solution Case Study

Pizza Chain to Switch 10,000 Store Servers to Hyper-V to Increase Reliability, Performance

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Retail—Food service

Customer ProfileDomino’s Pizza is a leader in pizza delivery and carryout, with more than 10,200 stores in more than 70 international markets. Domino’s is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and employs an estimated 205,000 people.

Business SituationDomino’s wanted to improve the reliability and performance of its 10,000 US store servers, which are critical in feeding orders to pizza makers and running the company’s point-of-sale system.

SolutionDomino’s is switching its in-store virtualization software to Hyper-V in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and uses Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage those servers.

Benefits Improved reliability and performance

of store servers safeguards online orders

Increased IT efficiency reduces costs Lower licensing costs helps franchisees

“If our store servers go down, a third of our business evaporates. It’s that simple. It’s absolutely critical that our store servers remain running, and with Hyper-V, we’ve reduced store downtime.”

Lance Shinabarger, Vice President, Global Infrastructure, Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s Pizza makes and delivers more than 1 million pizzas a day worldwide. Its store servers are critical to receiving orders, taking payments, scheduling staff, and every other aspect of store operation. The pizza giant plans to switch its 10,000 US store servers to the Hyper-V virtualization technology in Windows Server 2008 R2 to eliminate reliability and performance problems it experienced with its previous virtualization solution. Since moving its first 1,500 servers to Hyper-V, Domino’s has seen virtualization-related help-desk calls and performance glitches practically disappear, which removes barriers to taking orders and serving customers. By taking advantage of its Microsoft license, Domino’s has a cost-effective virtualization solution. Domino’s uses Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage 15,000 servers with only two people, a huge efficiency achievement.

SituationDomino’s Pizza is a recognized world leader in pizza delivery. It ranks among the world’s top public restaurant brands, with a global network of more than 10,200 stores in more than 70 international markets. In terms your stomach can understand, Domino’s delivers more than 1 million cheesy, delicious pizzas a day to hungry customers all over the world, generating sales of more than US$7.4 billion in 2012. It’s estimated that the Domino’s system employs more than 205,000 franchise and corporate employees across the United States.

Domino’s has long used technology to fuel business growth and customer convenience. It is consistently among the top five companies in online transactions and today receives one-third of all US orders over the Internet. Domino’s diverse mobile ordering apps let customers order from 80 percent of the world’s smartphones.

As online orders poured into the company’s store computers in rising volumes, it became increasingly critical that those computers be up and running to receive them. “In the early days, computers were secondary to our business,” says Lance Shinabarger, Vice President of Global Infrastructure for Domino’s Pizza. “Every store had a small server—a PC, really—that ran our green-screen point-of-sale system. If a store system went down, it wasn’t a big deal; the staff could continue to take orders on paper. Sometimes a store server was down for a week, but the business rolled on without it.”

However, in 2000, Domino’s developed a proprietary point-of-sale (POS) system called Domino’s Pulse that replaced the

green-screen system with a powerful, graphical interface-based program that computerized nearly all aspects of store operation, from inventory to order taking to staff scheduling. Employees grew so dependent on Domino’s Pulse that many could not function without it. If the computer went down, some stores actually closed their doors.

Between the rising dependence on Domino’s Pulse and the increase in online orders, Domino’s store server uptime became absolutely critical to the business. “We lose money and potentially customers when a store computer is down,” Shinabarger says. “We had to figure out how to improve the stability of our store environment.”

The IT staff decided to put a second server in each store for backup. However, store employees were pizza makers, not IT pros, and it was painful and time-consuming for them to grapple with switching Domino’s Pulse to the backup computer, especially in the middle of a rush of orders. Domino’s needed a solution that its Ann Arbor, Michigan–based IT staff could manage without troubling store employees.

The IT staff decided to use virtualization. Domino’s had already proven the success of server virtualization in its data center and achieved phenomenal results in server consolidation, increased server utilization, and faster server deployment. The IT staff realized that virtualization might also hold the answer for store-computer reliability.

In 2007, Domino’s extended its data center virtualization solution to its nearly 5,000 US stores. It still maintained two physical servers in each store but ran its Domino’s Pulse POS on a virtual machine inside the

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“We lose money and potentially customers when a store computer is down.”Lance Shinabarger, Vice President, Global

Infrastructure, Domino’s Pizza

primary server. If that server failed, the Ann Arbor staff could easily and remotely “float,” or transfer, the virtual machine to the backup server. While this solution worked, the Domino’s Pulse virtual machine would not start in the morning after the physical computer restarted, which slowed store startup and generated scores of help-desk calls. The virtualization software also consumed lots of compute power, which caused performance and stability to suffer during peak periods, such as Super Bowl Sunday, when pizza orders came in fast and furious.

SolutionIn 2011, Domino’s began upgrading all of its store servers from the Windows XP operating system to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, in part to stay compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, a key retail IT standard. A “bonus topping” that Domino’s got by upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2 was the Hyper-V virtualization technology built into that operating system.

“We did our due diligence and evaluated other virtualization solutions, but Hyper-V was so much more cost effective than the others,” says Peter Echtinaw, Team Leader, Windows Platform for Domino’s Pizza. “Because franchisees have to spend their own money on some of this technology, we wanted a cost-effective solution for them. We already had an Enrollment for Core Infrastructure agreement as part of our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, so Hyper-V delivered significant financial benefits.”

Additionally, Domino’s conducted performance benchmarks among virtualization contenders, and Hyper-V came out on top. By moving from a hosted

virtualization platform to a native Hyper-V environment, Domino’s saw gains in every category of virtual machine performance: 36 percent RAM speed (megabyte per second), 28 percent hard drive write speed (megabyte per second), and the ability to utilize additional processor cores. Yet another reason to replace its existing solution with Hyper-V was the fact that Domino’s used Microsoft System Center data center solutions and could take fuller advantage of those tools by using Hyper-V in its stores.

Domino’s Pulse would continue to run as a virtual machine guest based on the Windows Server 2003 operating system, but by having that virtual machine running on a Windows Server 2008 R2–based host server, the POS would benefit from the more powerful CPU, memory, input/output (I/O), and other resources of a modern operating system and hardware.

Domino’s presented the Hyper-V solution to a number of its “power” franchisees, who were eager to switch to Hyper-V, particularly because of the performance improvements it promised. “Franchisees were very interested in a 64-bit virtualization solution because they were eager to get a faster, more stable system,” says Echtinaw.

To date, Domino’s is running Hyper-V on 1,500 US store servers and a few dozen international store servers. It is an optional upgrade for franchisees, but Domino’s expects most if not all US and many international franchisees to adopt the technology. “Hyper-V is a very desirable solution,” Shinabarger says.

Single Management Console

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“Hyper-V is a very desirable solution.”Lance Shinabarger, Vice President, Global

Infrastructure, Domino’s Pizza

The Domino’s IT staff uses System Center to manage all 15,000 US store servers (two physical servers and one virtual machine in 5,000 stores) from Ann Arbor. They use System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to monitor the health and performance of all 15,000 servers, the applications running on them, and the network connections to them. “Online ordering has driven us to really monitor our broadband connection to stores to make sure it’s up,” Shinabarger says. “As more orders have moved online, our dependence on System Center has gone through the roof.”

For example, Domino’s uses Operations Manager to quickly determine if an issue reported to its help desk is widespread or an isolated incident. If an issue is detected in the POS system that requires development time to correct, the IT team can build an Operations Manager monitor that detects the problem scenario and automatically fixes it. This provides a stopgap while the team develops a root fix and prevents interruption to store operations during that development time.

Domino’s will upgrade to Microsoft System Center 2012 later in 2013, which will let server administrators create dashboards that give them and Domino’s management quick-glance visibility into the health of individual store servers and servers companywide.

The team uses Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to deploy applications and software updates to all 15,000 servers and to 2,000 client devices in the company. The Domino’s team especially likes the new application deployment model that System Center 2012 Configuration Manager introduces. Domino’s administrators can create rules to

determine whether an application should be installed on a client system—specifying, for example, “Do not install if a system has less than 1 gigabyte of RAM,” or “Do not install if the Windows version is lower than Windows 7.”

“The application model of software deployment has been huge for us,” says Echtinaw. “It helps us keep our entire environment consistent and in compliance with standards. It’s also a huge timesaver.”

Domino’s uses Microsoft System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection to protect store and data center servers from malicious software, and it plans to deploy the Orchestrator component of System Center 2012 to automate IT processes.

More Improvements ComingDomino’s also has plans to upgrade store servers to the Windows Server 2012 operating system to take advantage of increased disk I/O, easier virtual machine live migration, and faster disaster recovery. “Our store servers have only one physical hard drive that has to manage the host operating system, the guest operating system, and the complexities of high read-writes on our POS system,” says Joe Tocco, Associate Network Administrator for Domino’s Pizza. “Any assistance there will be helpful. The ‘shared nothing’ live migration will also be beneficial, as will virtual machine replication with Hyper-V Replica, which will give us easier, more cost-effective disaster recovery for store systems.”

Hyper-V “shared nothing” live migration provides the ability to migrate a virtual machine, without downtime, from one Hyper-V host to another host that isn’t part of the same cluster and doesn’t share

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“As more orders have moved online, our dependence on System Center has gone through the roof.”Lance Shinabarger, Vice President, Global

Infrastructure, Domino’s Pizza

storage. With “shared nothing” live migration, the Domino’s IT staff can perform storage and hardware upgrades to its store infrastructure with more flexibility and no downtime. Hyper-V Replica provides asynchronous replication of virtual machines between storage systems, clusters, and data centers over two sites to provide business continuity.

BenefitsBy replacing its older store virtualization technology with Hyper-V, Domino’s Pizza has improved the reliability and performance of store servers, which are critical to revenue flow. The company saves money by reducing software licensing costs and IT management costs: it is managing 15,000 servers across the United States with just two IT staff members.

Improved Reliability and Performance of Store Servers Safeguards Online Orders

“The switch to Hyper-V has translated into an improved online ordering experience for our customers, who are number-one to us.”

Shane Casey, Domino’s Pizza franchise owner in San Diego and Los Angeles,

CaliforniaSince switching its store servers to Hyper-V, Domino’s has seen significant improvement in store-server reliability and performance, which translates into fewer interruptions to

online orders and revenue. “I work closely with our help desk on store issues, and we’ve seen much lower failure rates with Hyper-V than with our previous virtualization solution,” says Tocco. “Hyper-V greatly simplifies and speeds the process of migrating Domino’s Pulse to a backup virtual machine. Since switching to Hyper-V, our help desk has experienced a 99 percent reduction in calls about Domino’s Pulse virtual machines not starting up in the morning.”

During peak pizza delivery times—notably, Super Bowl Sunday and US holidays, such as Halloween and New Year’s Eve—there used to be I/O freezes and Domino’s Pulse performance degradations associated with the previous virtualization solution. Employees panicked, and help-desk calls soared. Since switching to Hyper-V, performance-related support calls have also dropped dramatically.

Domino’s franchisees, too, sing the praises of Hyper-V. “The upgrade to Hyper-V has improved our online ordering,” says Shane Casey, Domino’s Pizza franchise owner in San Diego and Los Angeles, California. “We’ve noticed fewer slowdowns and fewer Domino’s Pulse errors in our stores, as well as an improvement in our operations. Domino’s online ordering is key to our stores’ performance throughout the Los Angeles and San Diego areas. When our online ordering slows or shuts down, a huge number of our customers are lost in an instant. The switch to Hyper-V has translated into an improved online ordering experience for our customers, who are number-one to us.”

Shinabarger puts these help-desk improvements in bottom-line business terms. “If our store servers go down, a third

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“I have two people managing 15,000 computers.… We’d have been under water without System Center.”Lance Shinabarger, Vice President, Global

Infrastructure, Domino’s Pizza

of our business evaporates,” he says. “It’s that simple. It’s absolutely critical that our store servers remain running, and with Hyper-V, we’ve reduced store downtime.”

Increased IT Efficiency Reduces Management CostsDomino’s has also been able to achieve impressive server management efficiencies with Hyper-V and System Center. “I have two people managing 15,000 computers,” Shinabarger says. “That’s a heck of a lot higher than the traditional 1:200 [server administrator to server] ratio. Our management capacity is light-years ahead of where it was three years ago. We’re automating more processes and building dashboards that give us an at-a-glance view of all 15,000 servers. We’d have been under water without System Center.”

Lower Licensing Costs Help FranchiseesBy taking advantage of its Microsoft licensing agreements, Domino’s has also been able to save money on software licensing, which benefits corporate and franchise bottom lines. “Our Microsoft account team put together incredible pricing for us, which delivered an overall savings to our stores,” Shinabarger says. “Overall, the licensing is much easier for our franchisees to plan for versus a large capital outlay every three to four years. From pricing to management, performance,

and reliability gains, Hyper-V has been a huge win for Domino’s.”

Windows Server 2008 R2Windows Server 2008 R2 is a multipurpose operating system designed to increase the reliability and flexibility of your server and private cloud infrastructure, helping you to save time and reduce costs. It provides you with powerful tools to react to business needs faster than ever before with greater control and confidence.

For more information, visit:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com

For more information about Domino's Pizza products and services, visit the website at:www.dominos.com

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2013

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center 2012

Configuration Manager− Microsoft System Center Operations

Manager 2007 R2

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware Lenovo M91P and M92P servers