Constellation Brands, Inc., headquartered in Fairport, New York, is a $6.5 billion international producer and marketer of alcoholic beverage brands. Constellation is the largest wine company in the world by volume. Since its founding in 1945, the company has expanded through organic growth and acquisitions, including the December 2007 acquisition of Beam Wine Estates from Fortune Brands.

The Challenge: Delivering and Optimizing Applications across the Enterprise

In 2001, Constellation implemented Citrix Presentation Server™ to deliver its new Lotus Notes e-mail applications to the desktop. Anthony Pochmara, server operations manager, said, “At that time, the Lotus Notes client was too large to fit on our workstations. Our computers did not have enough memory, and sometimes the processors were a little undersized to serve that application.” After the success of that initial project, Constellation expanded its use of Presentation Server to deliver JD Edwards One World Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software because the two solutions are highly integrated. Subsequently, application delivery using Presentation Server expanded to include about 25 applications.

Each of these applications, including JD Edwards, is managed and delivered separately within the company’s four divisions. However, when the company chose the Hyperion Web-based financial planning and reporting application in 2006, the aim was to consolidate delivery across the entire enterprise. “Hyperion was our first global application,” Pochmara said. “We anticipated upwards of 1,000 users, which meant a sustained load of anywhere from 500 to 600 users at a time. So we needed a solution to load-balance those Hyperion users on our servers.”

Constellation faced other application challenges, including performance problems with its cluster Web servers used to support nearly 270 Web sites accessed by consumers, retailers and restaurants. “With our strong growth, we needed the ability to scale the platform without affecting the delivery of our service,” Pochmara explained. The company also needed to provide high availability and performance of its global intranet site and a new HR site featuring Flash video.

Most recently, Constellation faced the need to quickly integrate about 120 new employees who were joining the company as the result of the Beam Wine Estates acquisition. “We only purchased the wineries, and remain in direct competition with Fortune Brands in the spirits side of the business,” he explained. “During the transition, it was critical for security reasons to avoid any connection between the Beam network and our network.”

Upgrading and Expanding the Citrix Environment

With assistance from Tri-Delta, a Platinum Citrix® Solution Advisor, the North America IT team is rolling out an updated version of Presentation Server with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 worldwide. The Citrix Presentation Server environment runs on about 85 HP ProLiant DL360 and BL20 servers and IBM X330 servers.

To load-balance the Hyperion Web application servers, the team evaluated several solutions including Citrix® NetScaler®. Pochmara said, “Although our consulting firm recommended a competitive product, testing showed that NetScaler increased application performance by about 30 percent. After implementing a pair of NetScaler appliances in front of the Hyperion servers, we added dynamic caching and increased performance by another 10 percent.”

Today, any user coming into the system via the corporate intranet or external customer sites accesses information through NetScaler. About half of Constellation’s internal users are salespeople; the other half includes customer service, marketing, administration and manufacturing employees.

More than 2,000 external vendors use the company’s Web sites to place and track orders.
“We use Citrix Secure Gateway as the secure point of access for our external customers. The three Secure Gateway servers are load-balanced behind NetScaler, eliminating a point of failure in the Citrix environment.”

Smoothing the Transition for Acquired Employees

The Citrix solution helped Constellation transition new employees from the Beam Wine Estates acquisition to its applications quickly and without security risks. Pochmara said, “We needed to deliver JD Edwards and document shares to those people without having them on our network because we are still in competition with Beam’s parent company. We created a third-party hosting site to publish the Citrix Presentation Server applications. In that way, the new employees could access our applications and Beam applications at the same time without any contact between the two networks. The flexibility of Citrix application delivery made the transition much faster and smoother.”

Optimizing Application Performance

Citrix NetScaler is playing an important role by optimizing availability and performance of Constellation’s application servers and Web servers. “Hyperion is fully enabled behind the NetScaler platform, and we’re now implementing Cognos as well. Our brand-new global intranet and a new HR intranet, which is full of Flash videos, are also behind the NetScaler platform. Flash, in particular, puts a huge load on our servers. Without NetScaler caching, we wouldn’t be able to offer video,” Pochmara noted.

The NetScaler solution directs user requests to the optimal server, provides high availability, maximizes server resources and provides traffic management for Constellation’s multi-site enterprise through Global Server Load Balancing capability.

Pochmara commented, “Some of our Web sites receive upwards of 100,000 hits a month. We have an ordering portal for distributors that is heavily used. We are also a major wholesaler in Great Britain with 14,000 pubs and restaurants that order through our sites. NetScaler enables us to scale the platform without affecting delivery of our service –- today and into the future.”

He added, “We have since used NetScaler technology to enforce age verification for a selection of our brand sites. Since some of our content is directed towards mature individuals over the age of 21, we prompt users to enter their age at the entrance to the Web site. NetScaler tracks that entry, and ensures that all users who are not of legal age cannot access areas of the Web site that are directed specifically to adult users. Citrix NetScaler allowed us to provide the age verification solution to our developers without forcing them to re-code their content.”

Laying the Foundation for a Failover Disaster Recovery Site

“We acquired NetScaler with an eye towards building a failover disaster recovery site,” he continued. “One of Constellation’s objectives is to build a mini-site housing a subset of my servers. If we were to lose this datacenter, we’d default to the failover site and customers would never be aware that we were down.

“The business is asking for this –- they are saying ‘I can’t be without e-mail for an hour’ and ‘I can’t be without my BlackBerry for more than two minutes.’”

Both Presentation Server and NetScaler will play a key role in this initiative. Pochmara explained, “I can put additional NetScaler appliances in a failover center as well as my DNS servers, and immediately switch over to those identical, synchronized systems and continue to operate. Presentation Server is going to give me the same capabilities. I will have a subset of the Presentation Server farm for JD Edwards, and if this datacenter goes down, my users will just sign on to that farm and continue to work.”

Enabling Fast, Secure and Efficient Application Delivery

Several years ago, Citrix Presentation Server enabled Constellation to move to version 7 of JD Edwards One World when the “green screen” edition was phased out. “We would not have been able to make the transition without Presentation Server,” Pochmara said. “Our users don’t realize what a great job Presentation Server does for them because they have never had to run the ERP application locally.”

Today, the company is continuing to transition smaller applications to the Citrix platform. “For example, one that we have implemented is a product called Sure Harvest used by a dozen wineries. It was hosted on a workstation in someone’s office in the middle of a vineyard in the Napa Valley. By installing it on Presentation Server, many people can share it simultaneously instead of the four-person limit we were dealing with.”

Citrix Presentation Server also helps Constellation comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulations. Secure Gateway for Citrix Presentation Server provides Internet-based application delivery to remote users with a high level of security. Pochmara concluded, “We are Citrix fans.”

Future Plans

Constellation is considering implementing Citrix WANScaler™ to move local file servers and file shares from remote locations into its datacenter. WANScaler would be used to accelerate the performance of files over the WAN.

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