Littlewoods makes a storage saving

Retail chain Littlewoods has said it expects to save £750,000 a year after merging its data storage facilities into two 'farms'. The move eliminates the need to add servers to meet demands for increased storage.

David Hallett, Littlewoods' group IT director, said the company's storage capacity now exceeds 20 terabytes and is growing rapidly. The retailer operates home-shopping catalogues and almost 300 stores.

"I would estimate that in terms of performance gain and savings in backup time, the pooling of direct access storage devices is saving Littlewoods more than £750,000 a year," said Hallett. "This rate of return on investment is easily meeting our goals."

The storage farms will be managed using packages from application storage management software provider Veritas, licensed in a deal worth £1.1m.

Veritas' NetBackup and Foundation Suite will automate centralised online management and backup.

Veritas is the world's largest maker of storage management software - its main competitors are BMC Software, Legato and Sun Microsystems.

Hallett said that as storage needs grew, the retail giant had to review its strategy of running separate storage on each of its datacentre servers.

"Each server was running its own application, and sizing applications for storage became a major issue," he said. "If you ran out of disc storage on any one box you had to add another box, so we had to turn this on its head and provision servers on the back of storage."

"Centralised management gives us the ability to administer and maintain our IT systems across the board, without even having to take the system down," he added.

The retail giant now has the flexibility to move storage around and improve uptime of applications, Hallett added. This brings it closer to its goal of a round-the-clock operation, which is vital for the development of its online business.

Littlewoods has created two mirrored EMC storage farms, connected by a fibre channel link, with StorageTek robotic tape silos to perform backup.

This provides a central resource for 35 Sun Microsystems E1000 servers, MVS and Bull mainframes, and DEC and Windows NT servers.

See also:

Littlewoods Pools to get web facelift

The Littlewoods Pools will be extended online through the launch of pan-European website by Trevor Hemmings, the entrepreneur who bought the company last week for £161m.  04 Jul 2000

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