About Success Apparel
Based in New York, Success Apparel is a leading children's apparel manufacturer, selling merchandise to a variety of retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, Kohls and J.C. Penney. The company stays abreast of trends for kids and manufactures clothing that appeals to a broad range of consumers.
Challenge
For a global retailer, e-mail is a mission-critical communication tool. Success Apparel works with partners and distributors worldwide and its employees rely on e-mail to do most of their communication across multiple time zones. A large design team sends huge files that need to be passed through the network and printed quickly.
With so much international e-mail, the company's Microsoft Windows infrastructure was vulnerable to viruses, and downtime was becoming an issue. The IT staff had to patch and reboot servers on a regular basis. When the organization moved to a new corporate headquarters, the IT staff decided to evaluate its options for a more stable architecture.
Novell Solution
Success Apparel consulted with P&M Computers, Inc., a Novell Gold Partner in New Jersey specializing in Linux, regarding its new infrastructure. P&M recommended SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server with VMware for virtualization, running on IBM xSeries servers.
"P&M Computers presented a great proposal and really steered us in the right direction," said Steve Golub, manager of Operations for Success Apparel. "The virtualization with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Linux gives us tremendous cost and space savings."
Success Apparel had to set up its new office with a smaller data center. By creating a virtual infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and VMware, the IT team consolidated its 19 Windows servers to 9, significantly reducing both hardware and software costs.
Within its virtual infrastructure, Success Apparel is also running several virtual Novell Open Enterprise Servers.
"The selling factors for Open Enterprise Server are all of the great networking features," said Francis Poeta, president of P&M Computers. "We wanted to give Success Apparel robust file storage and printing, along with the stability and reliability of Linux. We could have used various open source tools, but Novell Open Enterprise Server on Linux provides everything we need from one major vendor."
Success Apparel now has a more secure and stable environment for its Lotus Notes and Domino applications, as well as other mission-critical applications including its SAN and disaster recovery solutions. Using the Web-based interface of Novell iManager for centralized control, the IT staff can manage its entire network without having to physically visit individual servers.
"With our previous Windows environment, it was harder for us to manage everything at once, like an orchestra without a conductor," said Golub. "We have found that Novell Open Enterprise Server running Linux not only has greater integration, but makes for a much more secure and reliable network."
Novell iPrint is one of the most popular features of the network, giving users the ability to view a map of printers on the network and click to print to any one of them, regardless of location.
"In a retail design business, our employees require a lot of hard copies, even though data storage is cheap," said Golub. "Novell iPrint not only makes it easy to install and set up new printers, but also to manage them. Our designers can push a tremendous amount of data through our printers quickly and without any issues."
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also made it easy for Success Apparel to replicate file, print and DNS services simultaneously to another site, a disaster recovery strategy that would have been more cumbersome in its previous Windows environment.
"With Novell, we are able to deliver enterprise Linux solutions at mid-market realities," said Poeta. "We built a solution for Success Apparel based on the principles of virtualization, open technology and disaster recovery–everything needed to survive as a business in the 21st century."
Results
By moving from a Windows environment to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Success Apparel consolidated its servers by more than 50 percent. Consolidation greatly reduced the company's total cost of ownership and significantly reduced the amount of space needed in its data center.
A stable and reliable infrastructure has reduced administration time by 25 percent because the IT staff no longer needs to install regular patches and reboot servers. The IT staff has freed up time to concentrate on other projects, including new retail-specific solutions that will make the company even more competitive.
"We operate in an industry with small margins, so any savings from technology goes straight to the bottom line," said Golub. "Because our new environment is so much more stable and manageable than before, we have more time to spend finding new ways for technology to make a difference to our business."