| | AUGUST 201919CIOReviewBEFORE AND AFTER WE ADOPTED SERVER VIRTUALIZATIONThis year Harley-Davidson celebrates 115 years as an iconic U.S. manufacturing company. Through these 115 years, we have continuously evolved to deliver premium experiences that fulfill our customers' dreams of personal freedom. Harley-Davidson is a global manufacturer, a robust retail and experience business, and a financial services organization that helps dealers and customers through funding and insurance. Our company's 10-year objectives to grow 2 million U.S. riders, grow the international business to 50 percent of annual volume and launch 100 new high-impact motorcycles require an IT organization that adapts quickly to a changing business landscape and enables robust digital experiences while overcoming the limitations of our legacy workloads.These 10-year objectives required a transformation in our IT operational efficiencies. As we looked at the industry trends --infrastructure-as-a-service, software-defined infrastructure, software-as-a-service and the increased use of digital platforms --we decided that the virtualization of our application and infrastructure stack was a must. We set goals to have higher system availability, simple disaster recovery capabilities, increased operation efficiencies, and cloud-ready infrastructure. Over the last several years, we have accomplished these goals and more by moving 95 percent of our x86 server workloads to virtualized environments using VMware, Inc. Higher System Availability - Virtualization allows Harley-Davidson to eliminate hardware failure impacts on service recovery as we have a duplicate host ready to accept the workload. In the physical world, our recovery times for critical services for our dealers, customers or employees could include two to four hours for parts replacement or would require implementation of complex and costly replication solutions. Virtualization has also given Harley the capability to extend the life of many of our aging assets. We were able to virtualize our older legacy workloads to run on the latest hardware without changing functionality. This virtual-to-physical conversion takes place frequently on our interconnected shop floor between manufacturing equipment, tools, applications, and servers. Simple Disaster Recovery ­ Image-based disaster recovery makes backups almost instantaneous from the virtual machine perspective, and with stretch clustering, we can failover virtual machines between datacenters instantly. This level of "live-DR" was not possible in the past and instead required at least a reboot to failover to the DR site. This capability enables us to perform DR tests more frequently with higher success. We are also able to restore clones from the image backup for application and performance testing and use these backup images if we have a failure during regular maintenance to minimize any impact to our business.Increased Operational Efficiencies ­ The move to virtualization has provided several operational efficiencies for our global IS organization. The most visible is the reduction in our physical datacenter. We achieve a 50:1 consolidation ratio of VMs to hosts, which means we technically have a data center 50 times smaller and consuming 50 times less power than it would if all servers were physical. This not only equates to space but helps us avoid costly By Tom Hardin, Chief Technology Officer, Harley-Davidson Motor Company
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