Application search and business analytics at scale with Elastic Cloud Enterprise
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If you’ve recently enjoyed an alcoholic beverage, chances are it came from a Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits warehouse. Southern Glazer’s is the largest national distributor of beverage alcohol and wine, with 22,000 employees across North America and the Caribbean. They have 12.5 million square feet of warehouse space in the US, their distribution fleet is 2,700 trucks strong, and they boast $18 billion in sales annually. Southern Glazer’s sells to retailers across the country, including Costco, Publix Liquors, and Total Wine & More.
Alvaro Cabrera, Southern Glazer’s principal infrastructure and platforms engineer, says the company is growing through acquisitions, and these mergers present a huge data challenge. With each acquisition, Southern Glazer’s has to incorporate sales data from different markets, different companies, and different systems. Cabrera and his team have to get all this data into one place, massage it, and aggregate it — and they have to do it in real time.
Before adopting Elastic, Southern Glazer’s was using many different tools. Application access was limited to AS/400 screens and internal .NET browser-based applications, and reporting was limited to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) jobs. Performance was poor — they had limited remote access, no external users, and no way to aggregate the data from new acquisitions. On top of that, different business units had different methods of placing orders for liquor sales. This solution was neither efficient nor cost effective.
That’s when Southern Glazer’s moved to the Elastic Stack. Their initial implementation allowed them to aggregate the data from all their acquisitions in one place, resulting in improved performance. However, Cabrera’s team eventually realized that they needed help managing upgrades, merging their data, and evolving their index. They had few infrastructure experts who could handle all their data on a daily basis, but they needed to upgrade Elastic quickly, generate test environments on the fly, expand their clusters, and re-engineer shards and indexes to optimize search. They also needed to secure their environment with Active Directory, SSL configuration, and load balancing. So they partnered with the Elastic team and moved to Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE).
Now, ECE powers the system that runs Southern Glazer’s ordering and price quoting system, as well as reporting for their sales teams. The system also processes all index creation, data integration, and data requests. When customers search for a product on Southern Glazer’s website, these queries run seamlessly through ECE. Southern Glazer’s also uses ECE for user management and single sign-on (SSO) authentication, providing immediate access to their team.
With ECE, Southern Glazer’s is able to build Elastic clusters in a matter of minutes to hours, where before it would have taken them days. Their DevOps team can consume data faster and their system is distributed and failure tolerant. They can expand and upgrade ECE, Kibana, and Elastic cluster nodes without disrupting the flow of information. “And frankly, it was really easy to deploy,” says Cabrera. “I’m a Windows guy and I did all of this in Linux in a day or two.”
To learn more about Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits’ setup, including how they configure their entirely virtual environment, watch Alvaro Cabrera’s full Elastic{ON}Tour Presentation.
https://www.elastic.co/blog/business-analytics-at-scale-with-elastic-cloud-enterprise-at-southern-glazers
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