TechNet Radio -- Total Wine success story with System Center

Earlier this week, I sat down with my friends at Total Wine to talk about how they are using System Center.   

It's one of the first times that I've gotten to talk about technology and 'wine' instead of 'whine'. 

In fact, as part of my research to be fully prepared for the TechNet Radio interview, I opened up a nice Pinot Grigio just before the recording.

 

In the interview, we covered:

SC Data Protection Manager - replacing previous backup solutions that were unreliable and making backups 'fun' - with some interesting anecdotes on DPM v2 beta, 2007 and the upcoming SP1 (they are a TAP customer), plus some juicy tidbits on the pain that they had with backup with 'the other guys'

 

SC Virtual Machine Manager - as the Total Wine virtualization deployment continues rolling out, VMM is as much a part of their plan as Hyper-V itself.

 

SC Operations Manager - as the nerve center of all of TW's Microsoft and in-house applications.  The coolest part was in discussing the upcoming custom applications, Total Wine is designing the application (in-house) to be monitored by SCOM, instead of the other way around - to be sure that they maintain that one view of everything that matters to their business.

 

SC Configuration Manager - for deploying everything from new applications to replacement servers in remote stores.  The bottom line for TW is that store staff should know about wine and beer, not technology and POS applications.  To do that, all of their deployments and change control happens transparently via SCCM.

 

The audio shows 1 hour, but only the first 22 minutes are System Center with Total Wine - the rest are the Microsoft TechNet October Security Bulletins.

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If you'd like to lock in to the DPM portion of the case study, there is about 3 minutes of good introduction on Total Wine's business and infrastructure - and DPM 2007 is covered from around 3:30 until 9:30.  

To learn more about DPM and the rest of System Center in use at Total Wine - check out the Microsoft case study.

My sincere thanks to Todd Slan and Robert DeSantos at Total Wine for allowing Microsoft System Center to partner with them in helping them manage the Total Wine infrastructure - and to my friends in System Center and the folks at TechNet for putting this interview together.

 

-- Jason