Scotmid, a 250-store
Scottish retail co-operative, has replaced 23 Hewlett-Packard
servers to consolidate and virtualise its IT infrastructure with a
high-performance five-server IBM IT platform running VMware.
Scott Kerr, Scotmid's head of IT, said "Scotmid expects
significant power usage reductions as well as savings on
maintenance. We also expect reduced future spend through the use of
VMware virtualised servers."
The main applications are electronic point of sale, finance, HR,
payroll and e-mail, he said.
Scotmid Co-op was set up in 1859 and specialises in food and
toiletries through the Semi Chem retail chain. It also has a
property and development division, and a funeral division. With
more than 4,000 staff, it is one of Scotland's biggest
employers.
The IT initiative is part of a three-year, £40m investment
programme by Scotmid to refurbish and grow its estate.
Scotmid replaced its entire legacy infrastructure with fewer
virtualised servers and storage. These included IBM System p and
System x Servers, "n" series storage and Tivoli Storage Manager for
backup.
Scotmid now has a secure and resilient environment and has
achieved "significant improvements" on disaster recovery, said
Kerr. The new set-up has also cut the company's power consumption,
cooling needs and space requirements.