Client Story

Choosing Wowrack, Fire & Vine Hospitality Boosts IT Performance by 10x

Fire & Vine Hospitality sought the most efficient and scalable solution to run their business platform with a proven provider that could ensure service availability, overall performance, and a stress-free experience. That's why they chose Wowrack and now run the business infrastructure on Wowrack Turbo Cloud.

Overview | Challenges | Solutions | Results

Overview

The Fire & Vine Hospitality team is responsible for overall operational leadership, culinary expertise, product sourcing, marketing, and technology support for each of the company's properties. It successfully delivers excellent service and memorable experiences to each of its customers.

Finding a solutions provider who can deliver high infrastructure uptime and grow with scale while keeping up with performance demands can ultimately allow them to focus on what it does best: run and manage hospitality businesses.

Extremely Low Latency

10x Improvement in Performance

4x Compression Ratio

75% VM Data Reduction Rate

The Challenges

Fire & Vine Hospitality expects a significant initial growth spurt from the recent announcement of the new partnership between El Gaucho Hospitality and Jason Wilson, the Seattle-based chef whose cuisine and wines earned him the James Beard Award for Best Northwest Chef in 2010. Efforts underway combine the operations of 10 already successful hospitality properties in the Pacific Northwest (ranging from iconic steakhouses, chic boutique hotels, and restaurants) while streamlining overall operational leadership, marketing, culinary expertise, and product sourcing, in addition to technological support for each of its business unit.

"The Fire & Vine team is dedicated to providing the same level of service to each of our properties as they provide to our guests. On the technological level, we need to be able to keep up with- the rapid business growth and use technology accordingly to improve experiences at all layers of the business," said Chad Mackay, President. Fire & Vine Hospitality is ready for growth as "we bring a really good business platform," Mackay continued, referring to the operational side of business logistics.

Before Wowrack's involvement, the Fire & Vine Hospitality IT team was running a mishmash of different systems, some on-premise, some in a local web hosting provider, and some in restaurants. The old setup brings many challenges, including uptime, infrastructure stability, and the ability to scale (especially with different IT systems in place). With the launch of the new Hospitality group, the need to 1) consolidate, 2) simplify, and 3) keep up with performance is a much bigger requirement now. Fire & Vine Hospitality understands it needs a cloud partner to help the company provide the infrastructure necessary to scale its business appropriately.

The Solutions

"We initially looked at the ROl in continuing to use the same on-premise and odd mix of IT solutions with time to deliver a refresh for all business units, but it was just too slow and expensive," said Ashish Singh, IT advisor for Fire & Vine, Fierrotech. "Wowrack Turbo Cloud solution is essentially a cloud in a box that can run the ten business units and much more, scaling as we need. I also don't have to worry about performance with the insanely fast Samsung enterprise Flash Storage", continued Singh. "Wowrack Turbo Cloud is the perfect combination of modern technologies that allow businesses to deliver high infrastructure uptime, with the Wowrack support team behind it."

The setup and migration were effortless for staff; the internal IT Team worked with Wowrack engineering and support teams to migrate the initial infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud. The Wowrack team safeguarded the cloud migration with minimal downtime. "The Wowrack support team comes through," said Joe Pantastico, IT Support Engineer at Fire & Vine. "They took their time to architect the solution, deliver a solid infrastructure, and even help migrate our infrastructure to the Wowrack Turbo Cloud during late-night maintenance windows."

Wowrack Turbo Cloud was set up as a private cloud solution for Fire & Vine, meaning single tenancy, and rendered availability for Wowrack to guarantee performance, as no other tenants are competing for critical resources. The Turbo Cloud has a redundant platform with multiple compute hosts, a failover storage unit, redundant flash disks, and space-efficient snapshots.

Flash storage's inline compression and deduplication help significantly reduce storage usage and operational costs. In addition to the storage snapshots, Wowrack Turbo Cloud provides a Virtual Machine operating system, application layer backup, and a retention policy that adheres to the company's Data Protection Policy.

Further, regarding performance and the virtual backup environment, Wowrack also delivers the infrastructure solution to the cloud with myriad connectivity and security technologies, including MPLS routing, site-to-site VPN, single-tenancy hardware firewall, and security solutions.

The Results

The Wowrack team's migration for the entire Fire & Vine on-premise infrastructure to the cloud was done relatively quickly, with minimal interruption to the business. As a result, the all-flash Wowrack Turbo Cloud immediately impacted the technological support business operations. User's Virtual Desktop, Point of Sale Systems, core business applications, and databases experienced an immediate and dramatic improvement in overall performance, reaping a direct Return on Investment (ROI) for the entire business (which affects hundreds of its users).

"With Wowrack Turbo Cloud, the restaurant staff waits for less, and our customers get a faster response time from the system," said Lee Spires, Wine Syndicate Director at El Gaucho Restaurants. "We are also seeing a much more stable Virtual Desktop environment. Our email also seems to be working faster. This has been great," added Spires.

"The real benefit and added value of the Wowrack Turbo Cloud is to have a knowledgeable and dependable partner who takes care of our Cloud Infrastructure in its entirety so that we can focus on doing what we do best, which is running and operating our hospitality business," said Ashish Singh. "Our IT resources are now efficiently utilized to focus on solving complex business problems instead of constantly worrying about running IT infrastructure itself," added Singh.

Fire & Vine Hospitality will additionally not have to worry about tedious IT tasks involving infrastructure management, patching, 24x7 monitoring, and managing backup. The team knows they can count on Wowrack support if there are any issues. "Customer support is always great and extremely responsive. We never lose sleep over any issues", said Singh. "Wowrack has our back!" Fire & Vine Hospitality also reaps the benefit of scaling in the cloud without making unnecessary investments. With the Wowrack Turbo Cloud product in place, Fire & Vine profits from avoiding the overly expensive alternate solutions using a multi-tenant public cloud solution.

In addition to the operational and business benefits noted above, Fire & Vine has also seen a striking reduction in data usage using in-line compression, made possible with the lightning-fast Samsung Enterprise SSD. Flash Storage that provides up to 4x compression rate. The Virtual Machine production data usage has decreased by 75% while delivering up to 10x performance compared to the previous old storage system.

About the Company

Company Name

Fire & Vine Hospitality

Industry

Retail & Hospitality

Country

United States of America

Website

fireandvinehospitality.com

Description

Fire & Vine Hospitality, a Pacific Northwest hospitality leader, operates iconic and successful restaurants, hotels, and winery businesses under brands that includes El Gaucho Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and Portland; AQUA by El Gaucho; The Inn at El Gaucho, Miller’s Guild, The Lakehouse, Civility & Unrest and Eritage. The group is led by El Gaucho President - Chad Mackay, and James Beard Award winning Chef - Jason Wilson.

The real benefit and added value of the Wowrack Turbo Cloud is to have a knowledgeable and dependable partner who takes care of our cloud infrastructure in its entirety so that we can focus on doing what we do best, which is running and operating our hospitality business.