1. Data centre transformation

2. Background Domino’s Pizza is a worldwide home delivery pizza company
Founded in the USA in 1960
Over 25 years’ experience in the UK & Ireland
Domino’s Pizza UK & IRL plc continues to expand
FTSE250 company
Opening 60 new stores per year
1,200 stores by 2021
Playing a role in rejuvenating suburbs, regional and neighbourhood centres
The company’s core business strategy focuses on three key elements
Great pizza
Outstanding customer service
Innovative marketing
Domino’s operates using a franchised system
Very briefly dominos, franchised business with over 700 outlets in the uk and Ireland and a small but growing number in Germany
It’s a wholy franchised model
Business built on great pizza, fantastic customer service (typically hot high quality pizza delivered in under 30 mins) and innovative marketing.

3. No-one cares as much as we do ?
Power issues
Low reliability
Scalability issues
High cost to move
High effort
This was the argument used by my team for keeping the datacentre in house—
But we had problems, tell the power story…
My first week I was in the office early in the morning as I would often be.
Walked passed the computer room to hear lots of beeps.
Managed to get through the door to find that the servers were slowly powering down 1 by 1
Managed to work out that some of the power circuits had (not all)
Was on my hands and knees plugging servers in and out trying to work keep the core system running when
The FD walked in wanting to know why his wasn’t working !!
I have know idea what went through his mind but on a positive note I didn’t have any challenges when I needed to ask
For funding…..
No one care’s as much as we do… I think that we show how much we care by making sure that the most qualified and professional approach is taken to look after our systems and that isnt always in house.

4. What did we do and why ?
Key decisions - Out sourced or in house - Virtual or physical - Cloud, internal or hybrid - Outsource or SAS
Out sourced
Virtual (ex DB)
Hybrid
Outsource
So what did we do and what were the key decisions we made, and why >
Well It probably no surprise to say that I decided to outsource our datacentre
As you might expect this involved a fairly long and complex selection process however I thought perhaps I would take you through some of the key decisions.
We considered virtual of physical and decided that a wholly virtual environment would provide us with more flexibility moving forwards
the databases we keep as physical for performance reasons
In terms of cloud we went for a hybrid model using private cloud as this allows us to learn about the technology and its pro-s and con-s, as we do this I expect us to move more into the cloud.
And we decided to keep the key knowledge of our systems in house to enable us to keep a level of control and to enable us to manage our suppliers.
In terms of the actual transition..

5. How did we do it ? Dedicated Team Planned Built parallel environment
Services moved
1 by 1
Low priority services 1st
High priority later
Kept stakeholders informed
Accepted learn as you go…
Challenge was that we didn’t have a good understanding of our current environment
So although we did a lot of planning the approach we took was to build a parallel environment,
Move the services 1by 1 starting with the low priority services and to learn as we go.
We accepted that we wouldn’t get everything thing in fact we told our stakeholders that we should expect problems.
As it turned out everything went pretty smoothly with the exception of some of our webservers where we experienced some performance issues a week after the transition took place. This was tough for the business but really convinced me that we had chosen the correct partner, they way the teams pulled together to work the problem was fantastic.
It also demonstated to me very graphically the power of these new technologies.
- We were seeing performance issues under load and needed to buy more time to analyse the problem hence we decided
to double the number of servers running overnight, the first advantage that we saw was that our partner were able to build these overnight…
We doubled our capacity overnight !!.
It was only a day or so later that the team came to me and reminded me that as these were virtual servers we didn’t need to build anything new, all we needed to do was turn up the dial on the servers adding more memory and CPU !!!.

6. The Results Reliability at 99.999%, Lower business risk
More time spent adding value, less on installing servers
- eCommerce sales significantly up
- Launched more mobile platforms
- More systems for our franchisees
In 2010 our downtime ran at about 99.6%
It improved in 2011 running at about 99.94%
Since the transition and so far in 2012 we have been running at % ands that’s while we have been seeing major increases in sales
That’s not the only advantage, because we outsource my team are able to spend more of their time doing things that add real business value….
Well that’s our story, any questions.

7. Any Questions ?