Jenny Craig - Infrastructure Relocation Project
Client overview
Jenny Craig is a brand that is synonymous with successful weight management.
Since its initial opening in 1983 with 9 centres, Jenny Craig Australia and New Zealand has expanded to over 100 centres across the two countries.
With a reputation as one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading Weight Management companies, Jenny Craig has enabled thousands of people to lose weight safely over the last 28 years.
Situation analysis
After experiencing a period of strong growth, the Jenny Craig head office had outgrown its premises and needed to relocate to larger, more modern offices. The larger premises also afforded Jenny Craig the opportunity to bring its head office and call centre operation, located in a separate offices, under the one roof. Jenny Craig enlisted Kiandra IT as its preferred supplier to manage and deliver the successful relocation of its infrastructure.
An audit of Jenny Craig’s technology assets uncovered a range of aging hardware with multiple failure points. The state of Jenny Craig’s hardware substantially increased the risk of critical failure during physical transportation. An uncertainty around the effectiveness of backups and hardware replacement also made the relocation a risky project.
Kiandra Solution
In close consultation with Jenny Craig, Kiandra recommended that the office relocation become a catalyst to mitigate risk in the environment and lessen the impact of the physical relocation.
The relocation project was split into three stages - planning, rationalisation and the relocation.
Both the planning and relocation stages were relatively straightforward however the rationalisation stage was significantly more complex. The rationalisation stage involved removing a portion of the risk in the environment through the migration of aging systems prior to the move.
Kiandra identified six Windows NT4 servers (domain controller, SQL Server, file servers and print servers), running on thirteen year old hardware that would be difficult to source replacement parts for in the case of failure.
The physical stress involved in relocating this obsolete hardware could have proved terminal.
Therefore, Kiandra undertook a Physical-To-Virtual Migration (P2V) utilising VMware vSphere to migrate these servers to a new, single VMware server. This meant the servers ran as they did previously but on a new, stable, physical host. Benefits of the P2V included the removal of legacy hardware failure risks, lower rack space, power and cooling consumption.
The new virtualised environment is fully scalable and flexible and new servers required in future can also be considered as virtualisation candidates.
Kiandra had flagged its uncertainty around the effectiveness of existing backups (due to the number of legacy systems running their own backup procedures) as well as the ability to recover fully and quickly from a failure.
The advantage of Kiandra’s new virtualisation strategy was that data and systems would be easily backed up using cost-effective, centralised enterprise-grade data security solutions.
Unlike the old environment which used fragmented and unmanageable solutions, the virtual environment offers greater data and systems protection including the ability to recover systems quickly, and on different hardware.
Jenny Craig’s email server had suspected hardware issues due to ongoing temperature problems in the server room. With no redundancy, limited support options and questionable performance, Kiandra felt that relying on this server to deliver over 1TB (1,000GB) of unmanaged email was a considerable risk for Jenny Craig moving forward.
The Kiandra solution moved Jenny Craig onto a cloud-based email service where the infrastructure and operations of the server (including redundancy, storage, spam/antivirus) is managed by a third party.
Kiandra’s recommended provider offered a fully featured, reliable Australian-based hosted Microsoft Exchange platform. With reduced risk and a lower infrastructure footprint, moving core services into the cloud has already began to reap benefits for Jenny Craig.
Kiandra also successfully relocated the PCs, notebooks and networking infrastructure required by Jenny Craig’s 80 plus head office and call centre staff to connect them to the information they need to effectively and efficiently perform their roles.
Delivering benefits
By migrating away from the problematic systems identified in the audit before the office move Kiandra’s solution ensured a successful relocation in what was otherwise a treacherous environment.
With an increased focus on securing the organisation’s sensitive information, implementing a robust back-up system and deploying stable hardware, the solution provides ongoing risk reduction and a high level of system confidence for Jenny Craig.
Kiandra’s solution is fully scalable and can continue to grow as Jenny Craig does.