Kingfisher Group has migrated
its 240 Castorama and Brico Dépôt stores on the continent to
Red Hat
Enterprise Linux with Oracle databases.
The DIY retailer says Red Hat has enabled it to halve the number
of servers it requires, and make a return on its investment in just
eight months.
At the same time, it is benefiting from a tenfold increase in
performance, the firm says.
Since 1997, Castorama and Brico Dépôt stores had been running an
IT system comprised of two types of server. One of the servers was
a Digital Unix Alpha server supporting production tools and
commercial applications, as well as an Oracle v7 database and Forms
application.
The second was an NT server for the infrastructure, covering the
network, domains, printing and file server.
When Kingfisher learned that support would soon be ending for
both the Unix and NT servers, it was faced with the challenge of
renewing a vast IT architecture for its Castorama and Brico Dépôt
stores.
"Overall, most of the open source distributions contained the
features we needed, including infrastructure services," said
Bernard Grulois, architecture and infrastructure manager at
Kingfisher IT Services, the group's worldwide IT organisation.
"But only Red Hat offered a business-ready Linux distribution
with the level of service, guarantee and support that we required
for the mission-critical information system that is needed for the
smooth operation of Kingfisher's continental Europe DIY stores," he
said.
The architecture was designed to include production tools and
the
database comprised of Oracle AS10G with an Oracle 9i database and
Webforms for the technical building blocks.
Every outlet in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia is now
equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on an HP ProLiant ML
370 G4 server with 8Gbytes of memory, Intel dual-core processors
and 5X140 Go disc in RAID 1.
After a three-month test phase in Spain, the servers were
deployed in French, Italian, Polish and Russian stores.
In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kingfisher IT Services found a
solution that allowed all of Castorama and Brico Dépôt's
requirements to be satisfied with a single server type, and the
ability to run both production tools and infrastructure services on
the same box.
This has translated into large cost savings and even faster
deployments and updates, said Kingfisher.
Grulois said, “We have achieved a return on our investment in
less than eight months, and we continue to benefit from the
advantages Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers, in terms of
maintenance, cost savings and high security.”
In addition, he said, the firm has seen an impressive
improvement in performance. “We have increased the speed of our
system 10 times and also improved the quality of overall service.
As for delivery at the user level, it is excellent,” said
Grulois.
Swedish armed forces migrate to Red Hat Linux
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