Problem

Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas is a multi-franchise business with over 30 locations throughout the United States. The IT infrastructure in place at each location is very complex, and each facet of the business has IT problems unique to their department. ADC had a goal of reducing their hardware footprint at each location by virtualizing their servers–including the Point-of-Sale systems. However, due to this being such a complex issue, ADC was unsure that the virtualization could be done successfully.

Solution

IronEdge was able to collaborate with Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas’ IT department and help them meet their virtualization goals. IronEdge first needed to make sure that virtualizing Point-of-Sale servers in the Alamo Drafthouse environment would be possible, so IEG spent a year conducting both lab and field tests to make sure that everything worked according to plan. IronEdge also worked with Alamo Drafthouse’s vendors and trained ADC staff to ensure that the surrounding IT environment would support the virtualization initiative. Due to the sensitive nature of the financials stored in the POS servers, it was critical that everything was audit compliant. In the end, IronEdge was able to virtualize 80% of all of Alamo Drafthouse’s servers. ADC now has a new virtualized plan to roll out during the construction of all new properties. This initiative decreased ADC’s hardware footprint and has led to decreased service time with server issues. After working with ADC’s internal IT department and external technology vendors, IronEdge and ADC were able to strengthen their Co-Managed partnership.

Conclusion

“IronEdge has gone above and beyond to find interesting solutions for problems we have had. We wanted a way to reduce our hardware footprint at new developments, and IEG helped us virtualize our servers. The POS companies had never done this before, and IEG was able to virtualize servers that we didn’t think could be virtualized. IEG did their homework and virtualized 80% of the standardized servers we had. The attention to detail with POS servers (credit card data) allowed us to virtualize in a safe and secure way. We have been so happy that now we are changing our rollout to entail virtualization from the get-go.” Randal White | Director of IT

IronEdge worked with ADC internal IT and external vendors to create an open and collaborative dialogue around their virtualization effort. The year of field and lab testing paid off because ADC has been able to virtualize almost all of their servers and now has a repeatable process for new properties going forward. This close relationship has also resulted in the creation of disaster recovery processes, so that ADC never has to worry about their systems failing in a catastrophic event.