Security Update Extra
The following is an advertorial sponsored by Diskeeper
August 21, 2007
Restaurant Orders Disk Defragmentation for Fast Service
With more than 900 restaurants and 40,000 team members worldwide, Ruby Tuesday has come a long way from the 1972 opening of its first restaurant near the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In 2006, the Maryville, Tennessee, company reported revenue from company-owned restaurants of $1.2 billion, representing more than 109 million meals served. Extending its uncompromising commitment to quality and gracious hospitality, Ruby Tuesday is opening nearly 100 new company-owned and franchised restaurants annually, further enhancing its reputation as a premier destination for simple, fresh American dining. All restaurant managers take on a daunting, multifaceted, non-stop responsibility every day, and those who work for Ruby Tuesday are no exception. Kitchen operations, customer wait-staff, order entry, seating, and table cleansing and recycling all must run with near-military precision to assure that guests enjoy a satisfying dining experience in a relaxed atmosphere. In addition to these dining-related operations, managers also schedule and hire staff, order supplies, submit payroll reports, arrange for building maintenance, and perform other business-oriented administrative tasks. Keeping the Computers from Causing Wait Time
Choreographing these activities requires computers in each establishment that run reliably and continuously at peak levels of performance. The restaurant's computers must avoid the gradual performance erosion over time that's common as hard drives fill up and as data that's continually added and deleted becomes fragmented. "Keeping our managers focused on running a disciplined operation is essential in providing a great dining experience," says Michael A. Thomas, Ruby Tuesday's Director of IT Infrastructure. "These food-service professionals are not IT experts and the last thing they should be concerned with is a problematic computer." To assure that its restaurants operate at the highest possible levels of efficiency, Ruby Tuesday relies on technology from two leading developers of restaurant management solutions linked through a small on-premises local-area network (LAN) and server. Any slowdown in server performance slows every aspect of restaurant operation, administration, food-preparation, and customer interaction. The company uses sophisticated software solutions that run every aspect of restaurant operation, including point-of-sale order entry, staff scheduling, menu and inventory control, kitchen order routing, payment processing, and more. Wait staff order-entry terminals use a touch-screen application that communicates through a controller and the server to dispatch food orders to ruggedized kitchen video display screens, from which chefs get the information they need to prepare each meal. Disk Defragmentation Is a Core Business Issue
Thomas's staff recognized that a key to maintaining high levels of performance and speeding file open and save times was to minimize file fragmentation on its hundreds of distributed systems. Fragmentation occurs naturally in all OSs over time. Files are stored as small chunks of data scattered throughout a hard drive instead of as a unified whole occupying a single contiguous area. Eventually, that use of fragmented disk space leads to performance degradation that gradually worsens.
For example, when deleted files open up areas of a hard drive for re-use, portions of new and modified files are saved to those first available open areas. As files grow and are edited and re-saved, they become increasingly fragmented, sometimes being broken into dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of pieces. Access times lengthen as the drive's heads shuttle back and forth across disk platters, reading file fragments in the correct order to re-assemble them in the computer's memory. The continual creation, modification, and deletion of temporary files adds to fragmentation.
Although disk defragmentation might seem to be a technical issue, it's a core business issue. Disk fragmentation is an enormous thief of productivity. Because performance erosion can be easily quantified, you can clearly demonstrate the benefits of regular disk defragmentation. A productivity loss of just 30 seconds per hour because of a slowdown in computer or server performance in a restaurant open 12 hours daily year-round is equivalent to 36.5 hours (47.5 forty-five-minute customer visits). For 900 locations with parties of three people spending an average of $15 apiece, the potential total revenue loss can be $2,137,000 a year, an enormous amount in the restaurant industry, where profit margins are razor thin. Disk Defragmentation to the Rescue
Instead of a reactive posture of servicing PCs in the field after performance difficulties appeared, the restaurant corporation chose to be proactive. The Ruby Tuesday IT infrastructure team adopted a strategy of installing a defragmentation solution on every new back-office computer. According to Thomas, the team established three requirements for choosing a defragmentation solution: It had to be completely automated, use minimal system resources, and operate invisibly.
To learn about the solution Ruby Tuesday implemented, click here to read the full white paper by Joel Shore. |
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