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 The Organization
With more than
900
restaurants and
40,000
team membersworldwide, Ruby Tuesday® has come a long way rom theopening o its frst restaurant near the campus o the Uni-versity o Tennessee in Knoxville in
1972
. In
2006
, the Mary-ville, Tenn. company reported revenue rom company-owned restaurants o 
$1.2
billion, representing more than
109
million meals served. Extending its uncompromisingcommitment to quality and gracious hospitality, Ruby Tues-day is opening nearly
100
new company-owned and ran-chised restaurants annually, urther enhancing its reputationas a premier destination or simple, resh American dining.
 The Challenge
Restaurant managers take on a daunting, multiaceted,non-stop responsibility every day. The renzy o kitchen op-erations, customer wait-sta, order entry, seating, and tablecleansing and recycling all must run with near-militaryprecision to assure that guests enjoy a satisying dining ex-
   R  e   f  e  r  e  n  c  e   G  u   i   d  e   C  a  s  e   S   t  u   d  y   S  e  r   i  e  s
Diskeeper Keeps the FoodComing at Ruby Tuesday
To keep its corporate IT help desk romboiling over, Ruby Tuesday serves updisk-deragmentation sotware onback-ofce computers in its restaurants
By Joel ShoreMay 2007
 
Diskeeper Keeps the Food Coming at Ruby Tuesday 
2
 
Reference Guide 
™
 
May 2007
perience in a relaxed atmosphere. In addition to these din-ing-related operations, managers also schedule and hiresta, order supplies, submit payroll reports, arrange orbuilding maintenance, and perorm other business-orientedadministrative tasks.Choreographing these activities requires computers in eachestablishment that run reliably and continuously whilemaintaining peak levels o perormance. Avoiding gradualperormance erosion over time, common as a computer’shard drive flls up or as data continually is added and de-leted, is essential to Ruby Tuesday.“Keeping our managers ocused on running a disciplinedoperation is essential in providing a great dining experi-ence,” says Michael A. Thomas, Ruby Tuesday’s Director o 
IT
Inrastructure. “These ood-service proessionals are not
IT
experts and the last thing they should be concerned withis a problematic computer.”To assure that its restaurants operate at the highest possi-ble levels o efciency, Ruby Tuesday relies on technologyrom two leading developers o restaurant management so-lutions linked through a small on-premises local-area net-work and server. Any slowdown in perormance o thatserver slows every aspect o restaurant operation, admini-stration, ood-preparation, and customer acing.They use sophisticated sotware solutions that run every as-pect o restaurant operation, including point-o-sale order-entry, sta scheduling, menu and inventory control, kitchenorder routing, payment processing, and more. A touch-screen application is used by waitsta order-entry termi-nals, which communicates through a controller and theserver to dispatch ood orders to ruggedized kitchen videodisplay screens where ches prepare each meal.Thomas’s sta recognized that a key to maintaining highlevels o perormance and speeding fle open and savetimes was to minimize fle ragmentation on its hundredso distributed systems. Fragmentation, where fles are
“We investigated another defragmenter and foundthat it did not meet all of our requirements. It wasnot designed to run auto-matically or invisibly.”
— Michael A. Thomas,Director,
IT 
InfrastructureRuby Tuesday, Inc.
 
Diskeeper Keeps the Food Coming at Ruby Tuesday 
Reference Guide 
™
 
3
 
May
2007
 
stored as small chunks o data scattered throughout ahard drive instead o as a unifed whole occupying a sin-gle contiguous area, is a natural occurrence in all modernoperating systems that leads to perormance degradationthat worsens over time.As deleted fles open up areas o a hard drive or re-use,portions o new and modifed fles are saved to the frstavailable open areas, resulting in ragmentation. As flesgrow and are edited, they become increasingly ragmented.Access times lengthen as the drive’s heads shuttle back andorth across the disk platters, reading fle ragments in thecorrect order so they can be re-assembled in the com-puter’s memory. The continual creation, modifcation, anddeletion o temporary fles add to ragmentation. Files o-ten are broken into dozens, hundreds, and sometimes eventhousands o pieces.Disk deragmentation is not just a technical issue; it is acore business issue, an enormous robber o productivity.Perormance erosion is easily quantifed, demonstrating theclear benefts o disk deragmentation.A productivity loss o just
30
seconds per hour due to aslowdown in computer or server perormance in a restau-rant open
12
hours daily year-round is equivalent to
36.5
hours, or
47.5
orty-fve-minute customer visits. For
900
lo-cations with parties o three people spending an average o 
$15
apiece, the potential total revenue loss can be
$2,137,000
a year, an enormous amount in the restaurantindustry, where proft margins already are razor thin.The Ruby Tuesday
IT
inrastructure team adopted a proac-tive strategy o installing a deragmentation solution onevery new back ofce computer, instead o a reactive pos-ture o servicing
PC
s in the feld ater perormancedifculties appeared. The team established three require-ments or choosing a deragmentation solution. “It had tobe completely automated, use minimal system resources,and operate invisibly,” says Thomas.
“Food-service professionalsare not 
IT 
experts and thelast thing they should beconcerned with is a prob-lematic computer.”
— Michael A. Thomas
of 00

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