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Storage consolidation at Shopper’s Stop

Shopper’s Stop felt the need to consolidate its storage as it found that maintaining independent storage silos for each of its businesses was far too complicated an endeavor. By Vinita Gupta

Shopper’s Stop has been growing rapidly, and the increasing size of operations has led to an exponential growth in data volumes. Realizing the need for a storage infrastructure that could be scaled on demand, without disrupting business operations, and introduce greater efficiency in the company’s backup and recovery processes to ensure high service levels to business users it implemented NetApp’s unified storage solution.

The company has 3 TB of data (network and server), out of which about 50% lies on storage solutions from NetApp.

Need for efficient storage management

Shopper’s Stop has two separate computing platforms—IBM iSeries and Intel/AMD servers. While the iSeries platform running a JDA retail ERP application had its own storage system, the Intel/AMD servers run the rest of the applications—Oracle Financials, HRMS, inventory management, SQL Server 2000 and 2005 databases, Microsoft Exchange 2007, and file services.

The lack of a centralized, managed storage infrastructure was a key issue in supporting the rollout of new applications across business units. The storage landscape essentially consisted of DAS islands that were not scalable and presented challenges in terms of efficiency of backup and recovery processes. With the proliferation of servers, backup in a DAS environment became time consuming, causing Shopper’s Stop to restrict regular backup to key servers only and have a different backup policy for the rest. Restoration of data impacted the uptime of systems, something not acceptable to the business.

Also, resource allocation was inflexible, leading to underutilization of storage resources in some areas and stressing of resources in others. Supporting the application rollout for different business units was a big challenge and so was handling the growth of users, because storage space became the limiting factor.

Arun Gupta, Customer Care Associate and Group CTO of Shopper’s Stop revealed that continuing with DAS would have meant that any storage upgrades would not only be disruptive, but they would not allow Shopper’s Stop to efficiently manage storage resources.

He added, “Each of our business units had specific application needs, which needed a rapid turnaround in application test/development processes. Having consolidated storage, supporting all storage protocols, eased this process for us. The obvious advantage of centralizing back-up/recovery processes, seamless scalability and adaptability to business needs were other factors that led to the implementation decision.”

From DAS to unified storage

Shopper’s Stop evaluated networked storage solutions from various vendors to consolidate all of their Intel/AMD-based applications. They finally decided to standardize on NetApp unified storage.

The implementation at Shopper’s Stop was aligned with some of the planned version upgrades of its ERP solution on Intel platform, particularly Oracle Financials and HRMS. These also provided some flexibility in planning the migration to the newer platform and reduce the risk of high outage. The implementation was conducted between June to August 2006, which are lean periods in retail activity in order to minimize inconvenience to internal users.

Gupta said, “As our application deployment is mostly centralized, the implementation happened at our central data center location within the corporate office. Since we had a fairly detailed discussion with the NetApp team, explaining our requirements and understanding how the solution would get deployed given the application landscape, the implementation challenges to that extent were minimal. However, there were a few issues we faced in order to tune our applications in line with the new infrastructure setup and certainly had to bring the application providers and the NetApp team on a single table for discussion to resolve such issues.”

Shopper’s Stop decided to run an Oracle Financials application on NFS, following the example of Oracle itself, which ran a large chunk of its environment on NFS. File services required CIFS access, and other applications, including MS Exchange, required iSCSI. NetApp unified storage thus offered a consolidated platform on which Shopper’s Stop could run all of their applications.

Benefits of the project

A significant benefit of unified storage was that backup and recovery processes were simple to handle. A different backup and recovery mechanism was not needed for each storage silo, which had a clear impact on application availability as well as the cost of backup.

Gupta mentioned that the NetApp solution for Shopper’s Stop has had several benefits. Storage consolidation has had a visible impact on backup windows. Weekly full backup windows have decreased from 24-28 to 14 hours, and daily backup windows have decreased from 14 to 8 hours. Unified storage has enabled the flexibility to increase storage space allocations to any application in any business unit, based on demand.

He stated, “Capacity increases are now non-disruptive in a consolidated environment. Consolidation has also allowed us to cost-effectively implement a high availability environment. Earlier, with DAS islands, implementing high availability would have meant investing in redundancy for each island, pushing up the cost of availability.”

NetApp storage virtualization has complemented Shopper’s Stop’s rollout of server virtualization to speed up application rollout cycles and quickly restore application servers. These have also helped Shopper’s Stop reallocate compute and storage resources on the fly and reduce the overall physical infrastructure requirements for the multiple business units that had to be supported.

The IT team has been able to service new or changed business requirements quickly with consolidated storage. Data infrastructure is no longer a bottleneck and the IT team has to focus only on the application rollout or changes/upgrades. Overall, availability and on-demand scalability have been visible benefits for business users and management.

Gupta believed that the most important benefit of unified storage for Shopper’s Stop was that even if data growth by application did not meet the forecast, it would be easy to increase storage space allocations without worrying about a particular storage silo running out of capacity. The seamless upgrade path that NetApp offered for both capacity and performance meant that scaling would be a painless affair.

Upgradation

When Shopper’s Stop initially consolidated storage with NetApp systems, their forecast was that they would upgrade the capacity in two years. However, with the rapid growth of their business, and new retail formats being rolled out regularly, they had to upgrade the capacity within just 15 months of implementation as the requirement within 24 months was almost twice of the original expectation.

The seamless scalability and storage virtualization capability of NetApp’s solution has helped Shopper’s Stop optimize storage utilization as well as upgrade as per business needs.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com