Carphone Warehouse said today it has implemented two
online storage units and halved its storage costs.
Carphone Warehouse, a retailer of mobile phones and services
with 700 stores in the UK and 1,300 in continental Europe, has
deployed two 3PAR InServ S400 Storage Servers, as part of a utility
computing (pay-as-you-go) IT system.
Over the last three years, Carphone Warehouse has seen its
online storage requirements rise from a single terabyte to several
hundreds of terabytes, and found that the cost and complexity of
traditional storage architectures yielded unacceptably low
utilisation rates.
As a result, the firm has moved to a “virtual data centre”
system. This is a utility computing environment, based on storage
virtualisation using 3PAR Utility Storage and server virtualisation
running on VMWare’s ESX application, running on cost-effective
Linux servers and IBM System p5 servers that run Advanced Power
Virtualisation and Virtual I/O software.
“With 3PAR Utility Storage, we have demonstrated a 50% reduction
in storage total cost of ownership (TCO), while significantly
increasing overall service levels,” said Steven Gall, enterprise
architect at the Carphone Warehouse.
“It is becoming increasingly important for IT departments to
deploy just the right amount of capacity over time and provision
capacity according to the exact needs of the business,” said Claus
Egge, IDC's European program director for storage research.
“Solutions such as the 3PAR array family show an engineering
commitment to giving such functions high priority,” he added.
Computacenter Services manages the system forCarphone Warehouse.
Terry Walby, datacentre solutions director at Computacenter
Services, said, “Managing unpredictable growth in demand with
adequate and cost-effective levels of server and storage
provisioning is a great challenge for many of our customers, for
whom Computacenter Services is able to offer a range of innovative
and flexible utility infrastructure solutions.”
Carphone Warehouse said the virtual data centre has helped it to
eliminate the downtime associated with running its own
datawarehouse; run extract, transform and load procedures in its
Informatica/Oracle environment without having to add extra storage
capacity; and increased its utilisation rates by consolidating its
storage for both disaster recovery, and test and development onto
one scalable system.
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