Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how Columbia Sportswear has harnessed virtualization to provide a host of benefits for business units.

1. Virtualization Spurs ERP Operations and Disaster Recovery
for Sportswear Giant Columbia
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how Columbia Sportswear has harnessed
virtualization to provide a host of benefits for business units.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how outerwear and sportswear maker and
distributor, Columbia Sportswear, has used virtualization techniques and
benefits to improve their business operations. [Disclosure: VMware is a
sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
We’ll see how Columbia Sportswear’s use of deep virtualization assisted in
rationalizing its platforms and data center as well as led to benefits in their
enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation. We’ll also see how it
formed a foundation for improved disaster recovery (DR) best practices.
Stay with us now to learn more about how better systems make for better applications that
deliver better business results. Here to share their virtualization journey is Michael Leeper. He is
the Senior Manager of IT Engineering at Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon. Welcome,
Michael.
Michael Leeper: Good morning, Dana.
Gardner: We’re also here with Suzan Frye, Manager of Systems Engineering at Columbia
Sportswear. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Suzan.
Suzan Frye: Good morning, Dana.
Gardner: Let’s start with you, Michael. Tell me a little bit about how you got into virtualization?
What were some of the requirements that you needed to fulfill at the data center level? Then
we’ll dig down into where that went and what it paid off.
Leeper: Pre-2009, we'd experimented with virtualization. It'd be one of those things that I had
my teams working on, mostly so we could tell my boss that we were doing it,
but there wasn’t a significant focus on it. It was a nice toy to play with in the
corner and it helped us in some small areas, but there were no big wins there.
In mid-2009, the board of directors at Columbia decided that we, as a company,
needed a much stronger DR plan. That included the construction of a new data
center for us to house our production environments offsite.

2. As we were working through the requirements of that project with my teams, it became pretty
clear for us that virtualization was the way we were going to make that happen. For various
reasons, we set off on this path of virtualization for our primary data center, as we were working
through issues surrounding multiple data centers and DR processes.
Our technologies weren't based on the physical world any more. We were finding more issues in
physical than we were in virtual. So we started down this path to virtualize our entire production
world. By that point, mid-2010 had come around, and we were ready to go. We had built our DR
stack that virtualized our primary data centers taking us to the 80-90 percent virtual machine
(VM) rate.
Extremely successful
We were extremely successful in that process. We were able to move our primary data center
over a couple of weekends with very little downtime to the end
users, and that was all built on VMware technology.
About a week after we had finished that project, I got a call from
our CIO, who said he had purchased a new ERP system, and
Columbia was going to start down the path of a fully new ERP implementation.
I was being asked at that time what platform we should run it on, and we had a clean slate to look
everywhere we could to find what our favorite, what we felt was the most safe and stable
platform to run the crown jewels of the company which is ERP. For us that was going to be the
SAP stack.
So it wasn't a hard decision to virtualize ERP for us. We were 90 percent virtual anyway. That’s
what we were good at, and that’s where teams were staffed and skilled at. What we did was
design the platform that we felt was going to meet our corporate standards and really meet our
goals. For us that was running ERP on VMware.
Gardner: It sounds as if you had a good rationale for moving into a highly virtualized
environment, but that it made it easier for you to do other things. Am I reading too much into it,
or would you really say that your migration for ERP was much easier as a result of being highly
virtualized?
Leeper: There are a couple of things there. Specifically in the migration to virtualization, we
knew we were going to have to go through the effort of moving operating systems from one site
to another. We determined that we could do that once on the physical side, relatively easily, and
probably the same amount of effort as doing it once by converting physical to virtual.
The problem was that the next time we wanted to move services back from one facility to
another in the physical world, we're going to have to do that work again. In the virtual space, we
never had to do it again.

3. To make the teams go through the effort of virtualizing a server to then move it to another data
center, we all need to do is do the work once. For my engineers, any time we get them to do the
mundane stuff once it's better than doing it multiple times. So we got that effort taken care of in
that early phase of the project to virtualize our environments.
For the ERP platform specifically, this was a net new implementation. We were converting from
a JD Edwards environment running on IBM big iron to a brand-new SAP stack. We didn’t have
anything to migrate. This was really built from scratch.
So we didn’t have to worry about a lot of the legacy configurations or legacy environments that
may have been there for us. We got to build it new. And by that point in our journey, virtualized
was the only way for us to do it. That’s what we do, it’s how we do it, and that's what we’re good
at.
Across the board
Gardner: Just for the benefit of our audience, let’s hear a bit more about Columbia Sportswear.
You’re pretty much across the board. You’re manufacturing, distributing, and retailing. I assume
you’re doing an awful lot online. Give us a sense of the business requirements behind your story
around virtualization, DR, and ERP.
Leeper: Columbia Sportswear is based in Portland, Oregon. We're the worldwide leader in
apparel and accessories. We sell primarily outerwear and sportswear products, and a little bit of
footwear, globally. We have about 4,000 employees, 50 some-odd physical locations, not
counting retail, around the world. The products are primarily manufactured in Asia with sales
distribution happening in both Europe and United States.
My teams out of the U.S. manage our global footprint, and we are the sole source of IT support
globally from here.
Gardner: Let’s go to Suzan. Suzan, tell me a little bit about the pace at which you were able to
embark on this virtualization journey. I saw some statistics that you went from 25 percent to 75
percent in about eight months which was really impressive, and as Michael pointed out, now
over 90 percent. How did you get the pace and what was important in keeping that pace going?
Frye: The only way we could do it was with virtualization and using the efficiencies we gained
with that. We centrally manage all of IT and engineering globally out of our
headquarters in Portland. When we were given the initial project to move our data
center and not only move our data center but provide DR services as well, it was
a really easy sell to the business.
We could go to the business and explain to them the benefits of virtualization and
what it would mean for their application. They wouldn’t have to rebuild and they
wouldn’t have to bring in the vendor or any consultants. We can just take their systems, virtualize

4. them, move them to our new data center, and then provide that automatic DR with Site Recovery
Manager (SRM).
We had nine months to move our data center and we basically were all hands on deck, everybody
on the server engineering team, storage, and networking teams as well. And we had executive
support and sponsorship. It was very easy for us to go to the business market virtualization to the
business and start down that path where we were socializing the idea. A lot of people, of course,
were dragging their feet a little bit. We all know that story.
But once they realized that we could move their application, bring it back up, and then move it
between data centers almost seamlessly, it was an instant win for us. We went from that 20-30
percent virtualization. We had about 75 when we were in the middle of our DR project and today
we’re actually at around 93 percent.
Gardner: One of the things I hear a lot from people that are doing multiple things with
virtualization, like you did, is where to start, how to do this in the right order? Is there anything
that you could come back with from your experience on how to do it in the order that
incentivizes people to adopt, as you pointed out, but then also allows you to move into these
other benefits in a way that compounds the return on investment (ROI)?
Frye: I think it surprises people that we have a "virtualize first" strategy today. Now it’s assumed
that your system will be virtual and then all the benefits, the flexibility, the portability, the
optimization, and the efficiencies that come with it.
But like most companies, we had to start with some of our lower tier or lower service-level
agreement (SLA) systems, our development systems, and start working with the business on
getting them to understand some of the benefits that they could gain by working with virtual
systems.
Performance is there
Again people are always surprised. Will you have SQL virtualized? Do you have SAP
virtualized? And the answer is yes, today we do, and the performance is there, the optimization is
there, and that flexibility is there.
If you’re just starting out today, my advice would be to go ahead and start small. Give the
business what they want, do it right, and give it the resources it needs to have. Don’t under-
promise, over-deliver, and let the business start seeing the efficiencies that they can realize, and
some of those hidden efficiencies as well.
We can support DR testing. We can support almost instant data refreshes, cloning, and snapping,
so their upgrades are more seamless, and they have an easier back-out plan.
From an engineering and development perspective, we're giving them technologies that they
could only dream of four or five years ago. And it’s really benefited the business in that we’re

5. auto-provisioning. We’re provisioning in minutes versus days. We’re granting resources when
needed.
It’s a more dynamic process for the business, and we’re really seeing that people are saying,
"You’re not just a cost center anymore. You’re enabling us, you’re helping us to do what we need
to do and basically doing it on-demand." So our team has really started shining these last few
years, especially because of our high virtualization percentage.
Leeper: For a company that's looking to move to this virtualization space, they’ve got to get
some wins. You’ve got to tackle some environments or some projects that you can be successful
at, and hopefully by partnering with some business users and business owners who are willing to
take a little bit of a chance.
If you set off trying to truly attack an entire data center virtualization project, you’re probably not
going to be really successful at it. There are a lot of ways that the business, application vendors,
and various things can throw some roadblocks in this.
Once you start chipping away at a couple of them and get above the easy stuff, go find one that
maybe on paper is a little difficult, but go get that one done. Then you can very quickly point
back to success on that piece and start working your way through the rest of them.
Gardner: Yeah, one of those roadblocks that you mentioned I've heard people refer to is issues
around licensing and tracking and audits. How did you deal with that? Was that an issue for you
when you got into moving onto a virtualized environment?
Leeper: Sure. It’s one of the first things that always comes up. I'm going to separate VMware
and the VMware licensing from app and application licensing. On the application side of the
house, it’s getting better today than it was two or three years ago when we started this process.
Be confident
You have to be confident in your ability to deal with vendors and demand support on
virtualization layers, work with them to help them understand their virtual licensing packages,
and be very confident in your ability to get there.
Early on, we had to just look at some vendors straight in the eye and tell them we were going to
do this, because this was the best thing for our business, and they needed to figure out how to
support us. In some cases, that's just having your team, when you call them support, not have to
open with "We’re running this on a VM.
We know we can replicate and then duplicate things in the background when we need to, but
sometimes you just have to be smart about how you engage application partners that may not be
quite as advanced as we are and work through that.

6. On the VMware side, it came down to their understanding where our needs were and how to
properly license some of the stuff and work through some of those complexities. But it wasn't
anything we spent significant amount of time on.
Gardner: You both mentioned this importance of getting the buy-in on the business side and
showing wins early, that sort of thing. Because it’s hard many times to put a concrete connection
between something that happens in IT and then a business benefit, was there anything that you
can think of specifically that benefited your business that you could then turn around and bring
back and say. Well that’s because we did X, Y, and Z with virtualization?"
Leeper: One of the cool ones we’ve talked about and used for one of our key wins involves our
entire architecture obviously with virtualization being key to that.
We had a business unit acquire an SAP module, specifically the BPC for BW module. That was
independent of our overall SAP project and they were being run out of a separate business group.
They came to IT in the very late stages of this purchase and said, "These are our needs and
requirements," and it was a fairly intense set of equipment. It was multiple servers, multiple
environments, kind of up and down the stack, and they were bringing in outside consultants to
help them with their implementation.
The interesting thing was, they had spec'd their statement of work (SOW) with these consultants
to not start for the 4-6 weeks, because they really believed that's how long it was going to take
IT to get them their environments and their hardware, using some of their old understanding of
IT’s capabilities.
And reality was that we could provide them their test and dev environments that they needed to
start with these consultants within a matter of hours, not weeks, and we were able to do so. I had
the pleasure of calling the finance VP and informing him that his environments were ready and
they were just probably going to sit idle for the next 4-6 weeks until the consultants actually
showed up, which surprised all sorts of people.
Add things later
We didn't have all their production capacities, but those are things we could add later. They
didn’t need production capacity in the first month of the project anyway. So our ability to have
that virtualized infrastructure and be able to rapidly deploy to meet business requirements is one
of the really kind of cool things we can do these days.
Gardner: Suzan, you’ve mentioned that as an enabler, not a roadblock. So being able to keep up
with the speed of business, I suppose, is the best way to characterize this?
Frye: Absolutely. Going back to SRM, another big win for us was, as we were rolling out on
some of our Tier 1 mission-critical applications, it was decided by the business that they wanted

7. to test DR. They were going down the path of doing that the old-fashioned way by backing up
databases, restoring databases, and taking weeks to do that, days and weeks.
We said, "We think we have a better way with SRM and our replication technologies. We have
that data here. Why don't you let us clone that data and stand it up for you?" Literally, within 10
seconds, they had a replica of their data.
So we were enabling them to do their DR testing with SRM, on demand, when they wanted to do
that, as well as giving them the benefit of doing the faster cloning and data refreshes. That was
just a day-to-day, operational activity that they had no idea we could do for them.
It goes back to working with business and letting them know what you can do. From a day-to-
day, practical perspective that was one of our biggest wins. It's going to specific business units
and application owners and saying, "We think we have a better way. What do you think about
this?" Once they got their hands on it, just looking at their faces was really a good moment for
us.
Gardner: Sure, and of course, as an online retailer, having that dependability that DR provides
has to be something that lets you sleep a little better at night.
Frye: Just a little bit.
Gardner: Let's talk a little bit about where you go now. Another thing that I often hear in the
market is that the benefits of virtualization are ongoing. It's a journey that keeps providing
milestones. It doesn't really end.
Do you have any plans around private cloud perhaps, getting more elasticity and fit-for-purpose
benefits out of your implementations? Perhaps you're looking to bring other applications into the
fold, or maybe you’ve got some other plans around delivering on business applications at lower
cost.
So where do you go next with your virtualization payoff?
Private cloud
Leeper: We consider ourselves having up a private cloud on-site. My team will probably start
laughing at me for using that term, but we do believe we have a very flexible and dynamic
environment to deploy, based on business request on premises, and we're pretty proud of that. It
works pretty well for us.
Where we go next is all over the place. One of the things we're pretty happy about is the fact that
we can think about things a little differently now than probably a lot of our peers, because of how
migratory our workloads can be, given the virtualization.

8. We started looking into things like hybrid cloud approaches and the idea of maybe moving some
of our workloads out of our premises, our own data facilities, to a cloud provider somewhere
else.
For us, that's not necessarily the discussion around the classic public cloud strategies for
scalability and some of those things. For us, it's a temporary space at times, if we are, say,
moving an office, we want to be able to provide zero downtime, and we have physical equipment
on-premises.
It would be nice to be able to shutdown their physical equipment, move their data, move their
workloads up to a temporary spot for four or five weeks, and then bring it back at some point,
and let users never see an outage while they are working from home or on the road.
There are some interesting scenarios around significant DR for us and locations where we don't
have real-time DR set up. For instance, we were looking into some issues in Japan, when Japan
unfortunately a year or so ago was dealing with the earthquake and the tsunami fallout in power.
We were looking at how we can possibly move our data out of the country for a period of time,
while the infrastructure was stabilizing, specifically power, and then maybe bring it back when
things settle down again.
Unfortunately we weren't quite virtual on the edge yet there, but today we think that's something
we could do. Thinking about how and where we move data to be at the right place at the right
time is where we think the next big win for us.
Then, we get into the application profiles that users are asking for and their ability to spin up
environments very quickly to just test something. It lets us get out of having IT as being the
roadblock to innovation. A lot of times the business or part of our innovation teams come up with
some idea on a concept, an application, or whatever it is. They don't have to wait for IT to fulfill
their needs. The environments are right there for them.
So I challenge the teams routinely to think a little bit differently about how we've done things in
the past, because our architecture is dramatically different than it was even two years ago.
Gardner: Well, great. We have to leave it there. We've been talking about how outerwear and
sportswear maker, Columbia Sportswear has used virtualization technologies and models to
improve their business operations. We’ve also seen how better systems makes for better
applications that can deliver better business results.
So I’d like to thank our guests for joining this BriefingsDirect podcast. We have been here with
Michael Leeper. He is the Senior Manager of IT Engineering at Columbia Sportswear in
Portland, Oregon. Thank you so much, Michael.
Leeper: Thank you.

9. Gardner: And we have been joined by Suzan Frye, Manager of Systems Engineering, also there
at Columbia Sportswear. Thanks to you, Suzan.
Frye: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to you all
audience for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how Columbia Sportswear has harnessed
virtualization to provide a host of benefits for business units. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.
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