WD-40 cuts server power consumption by 40 per cent by adopting private cloud following ERP migration

Shift from client/server to private cloud helps WD-40 to slash server requirements and power costs

WD-40, the multinational company behind well-known brand of lubricants, claims to have generated power savings of 41 per cent following a shift to a private cloud architecture, which coincided with a major enterprise resource planning (ERP) upgrade project.

According to Mark Breed, IT services manager at WD-40 EMEA, the company had for years relied on dedicated servers to run its various in-house applications. However, these had grown out-of-control.

"We had Dell platforms here, there and everywhere. So we had consoles left and right, managing different applications, managing the Dell server backbones, checking the health of everything, hooking everything in that comes in," said Breed.

The project didn't just enable the company to reduce the number of server hardware platforms that it supports, but also to rationalise the management of its IT estate, he added.

The shift to a private cloud, managed by Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, came after the company shifted its EMEA operations from Epicor iScala to Epicor E9, enabling it to upgrade its estate to three-tier client/server, before moving this year to Epicor E10, the latest version of Epicor's unified ERP system.

The Epicor E10 platform will be the final application that the company shifts onto its private cloud.

While WD-40 is a US company based in San Diego, California, its EMEA region operates independently from the US business, and makes its own IT decisions. Its flagship WD-40 products sold across EMEA in various forms, are manufactured in the UK from a "secret formula", Breed told Computing.

"We call it a ‘secret formula' because only a few people know the formula and how to mix it. The actual formula is stored in a bank vault in San Diego," he said. The product is mixed at the company's manufacturing facility in Milton Keynes, then dispatched in tankers to Manchester where the canning has been outsourced, before sale across the UK and export across Europe.

The company has staff of around 230 people in the UK and in branch offices across Europe. In addition to the well-known WD-40 lubricant, the company also has a number of other products, developed in-house but with production largely outsourced.

Nutanix was selected to provide the private cloud infrastructure and management following an analysis of the options by WD-40 systems administrator Jeff Longley.

These alternatives included Simplivity. However, as a traditional Microsoft house (more or less), according to Breed, it had always used Hyper-V and Simplivity only recently adopted support for Hyper-V. Another alternative considered - and rejected - was simply to update the Dell servers and to consolidate the software accordingly.

The solution encompassed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, together with NX-300 Series clusters running Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualisation, and the Nutanix Prism management console. "The idea is that the Prism console provides visibility into everything," Breed told Computing.

WD-40's Nutanix Enterprise Cloud system now hosts 52 virtual workloads, including the company's Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server database servers. All together, they occupy just over half of the Nutanix cluster's 30 terabyte capacity.

The ultimate aim when the project is completed, said Breed, is that the company will keep its production server in its Milton Keynes headquarters and another for replication and disaster recovery running at its co-location facility in London. Sites across Europe, meanwhile, only run their own file-and-print servers, which are replicated back to Milton Keynes.

A next step, perhaps, might be to examine more closely the IT rationale and economics of keeping the system on-premise, he added.

"The key benefits for us has been centralisation of our key IT applications. Before we had multiple Hyper-V servers, multiple different areas to manage. This has brought management down to one central ‘pane of glass'. In terms of power savings, it's generated a 41 per cent reduction in our power and cooling requirements," said Breed.

"It's significantly reduced our data centre rack footprint. Fewer servers means less cooling, and less cooling means less money spent on air conditioners and the power to run them," said Breed.

Systems administration has also been simplified as a result, he added.