30 January 2014

Shoe retailer Clarks was founded in 1825, and now has 600 shops in the UK and also operates in more than 35 countries worldwide. This rapidly expanding global growth is creating significant year-on-year increases in Clarks’ data volumes, especially with key business systems such as SAP. The IT team forecasted that even greater capacity would be needed for upcoming projects, and as a result a highly reliable as well as affordable storage system was sought.

Infrastructure support manager Andrew Felton says reliability and manageability were key concerns since Clarks’ SAP environment and other systems need to be constantly available. “Except for a short maintenance window each weekend, these systems are either serving users or running important batch processes 24 hours a day,” he says.

Clarks already had a tier 1 storage platform from IBM and wanted a new system to augment this as well as replace older devices. The vendor’s XIV system was of interest as it promised tier 1 performance at significantly reduced per terabyte costs than the existing tier 1 arrays.

After proof of concept tests, a pair of XIV systems was deployed at two main data centres, synchronously mirrored for business continuity using in-built replication software. The team migrated the data from Clarks’ entire SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse environment and moved into full production.

“We estimate that we now spend 75 per cent less time managing our storage systems,” says Felton. “We no longer need to spend time on storage planning, or maintain maps showing where the data is stored; XIV handles all the complexity for us.”

Clarks is currently virtualising its Microsoft Windows servers using VMware, swapping the current direct-attached storage onto its XIV systems. The team next plans to enhance its backup capability by integrating XIV advanced snapshots with its existing IBM Tivoli Storage Manager solution.

IBM says that snapshots will serve to backup the SAP systems to disk on the XIV first, making a full copy of the data in seconds and with no impact on users. Tivoli will then run a backup to tape for longer-term storage and as an extra layer of protection. In most cases, the vendor reckons that Clarks will be able to bring a system back online in minutes using the disk snapshot rather than hours from tape storage.