New Belgium Brewing, the fourth largest US craft brewer founded in 1988, has returned its core business applications from a cloud service to its onsite operations. The company has chosen Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as the underlying infrastructure to support exponential increases in its applications and data, “achieving greater control over its data integrity and security while improving speed to applications and saving IT costs.”
The competitive craft beer industry is growing rapidly, and IT would play an essential role in every phase of beer making, from procuring the raw materials to maintaining exceptional quality control, marketing and managing the business. To meet its expanding technology needs, the company initially turned to a managed cloud service. As it expanded its operations and added a new brewing facility, New Belgium realized that a high-performance, on-premises solution would be much more efficient.
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Microsoft Office 365
New Belgium Brewing selected on-premises infrastructure driven by Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as engines to host several mission critical workloads – ranging from production applications and business intelligence to ERP and CRM systems, SQL databases, SharePoint and Skype for Business – while still using a public cloud service to host Microsoft Office 365 for its employees.
Coupled with data analytics capabilities and management tools, including Dell EMC OpenManage and iDRAC, the new approach has resulted in substantial cost savings, including operational cost reduced by 66 percent annually, decreased production downtime, and boosted capacity on its bottling line by 25 percent.
“The craft beer market is highly competitive, and operations must be supported by a strong IT infrastructure across all aspects of the brewing process,” said Travis Morrison, IT director at New Belgium Brewing. “We continue to evolve our operations to make us more efficient and effective and to stay ahead of our competitors. Dell EMC has been a strategic partner, taking the time to understand what we want to achieve and providing us with the right guidance and solutions. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers have delivered exceptional performance and cost savings and have been an essential fuel our success.”
Multi-Cloud Strategies
New Belgium Brewing would join an increasing number of businesses returning key workloads from public or managed clouds to on-premises or private clouds, and, most often, adopting multi-cloud approaches. According to analyst firm IDC, 80 percent of companies have repatriated applications or data, primarily part of a public cloud environment, to an on-premises or private cloud solution in the past year due to security reasons, performance, cost and/or control. At the same time, IDC finds more than 70 percent of companies are using more than one type of cloud environment, while the largest data center challenge most companies currently face is developing a successful multi-cloud strategy.
“Our most mission-critical workloads simply must be run locally,” said Adam Little, senior systems administrator, New Belgium Brewing. “This includes programmable logic control and process automation for brewing – right down to opening and closing valves. We can’t risk running that over a WAN link.”
“The increasing amount of data generated is creating tremendous opportunities today, but not all data is equal nor do all applications require the same level of infrastructure, latency and support,” said Matt Baker, senior vice president, strategy and planning, Dell EMC. “An effective multi-cloud strategy optimizes mission-critical and non-mission critical workloads running across the right mix of on-and off-premises private, public and hybrid cloud environments to deliver for the unique needs of every business. Organizations are increasingly assessing the requirements and costs of running their different applications and decided where it makes the most sense to have them hosted. We are committed to helping New Belgium and our customers develop their own unique cloud strategies, enabling them to make the most of their IT investments, safeguard their data and remain competitive.”
