Logicalis

Virtualised data centre reduces capital requirement

The Client

Galiform plc is the parent company of Howdens Joinery, a leading supplier of kitchens and joinery to trade customers across the UK. Founded in 1995, the company has a turnover of £790m, more than 450 trade depots across England and Wales, and is currently piloting outlets in France.

Employing 5,750 people in manufacturing, sourcing, logistics and depots, Howdens helps some 234,000 building industry customers sell, design and install projects profitably by supplying around four million cabinets, two million doors and 400,000 complete kitchens each year.

The Challenge

Following the demerger from its consumer retail division MFI to focus on its Howdens business, the business was obliged to vacate its primary data centre located at the Group's head office. Rather than carrying out a classic “lift and shift” of its core IT to a replacement site, however, Howdens IT director David Hallett says the company saw this as the opportunity to “refresh” much of its ageing hardware estate and to implement more robust disaster recovery procedures.

“After reviewing several options, we decided to turn our existing backup site into our primary data centre and to base our replacement infrastructure on IBM architecture, using IBM Global Financing to help us balance the capital outlay required. To help us design and implement our new data centre infrastructure, we agreed a £4.5 million three-year partnership with Logicalis.”

Hallett says that, historically, the Group had used IBM System p equipment in its primary data centre at Colindale in London, and in its Brackmills backup centre at Northampton.

“Our IT estate had grown somewhat piecemeal over the years, and rather than utilising the major features of System p architecture – in other words, very large computers with multiple processors and logical partitions – we'd ended up with a proliferation of smaller servers with a variety of processor types, which had become very difficult to manage. To make matters worse, we'd accumulated an assortment of storage technologies of varying age and 250 different Windows servers.”

The Solution

As part of its decision to migrate its head office and primary data centre to the Brackmills site - backed up by a new third-party DR data centre in Harrogate – Howdens elected to adopt IBM p595 servers running AIX, IBM N Series storage and IBM Blade Centre technology on which to consolidate its Windows IT infrastructure under VMware.

In the absence of sufficient in-house resources to design and embed its new data centre from scratch, Hallett says he was thankful to have Logicalis as a partner with extensive experience and resources to implement VMware and in analysing which applications would convert to run successfully under this technology.

“This was by no means straightforward,” he says. “While 220 of our Intel servers went down successfully into the Blade Centre – resulting in huge savings on maintenance - around 30 were unsuited to this kind of virtualisation.”

With help from Logicalis, Howdens has now successfully consolidated and virtualised its core IT infrastructure - including servers, storage, UNIX operating system and Windows estate – which means it is now benefitting from much greater agility, efficiency and enhanced performance of its IT systems.

The Outcome

“Our demerger required careful planning and foresight across the entire business to ensure a seamless transfer of operations, but it also presented us with the opportunity to deconstruct our existing IT strategy and rebuild an infrastructure that would integrate with our long-term proposition,” says Hallett.

By way of example, he points to the fact that in the past disaster recovery had often been measured in days. “A major objective of this project was to be able to invoke recovery within four hours. Logicalis has been instrumental in helping us test this on a regular basis to ensure we can now invoke all our systems within this timeframe in the unlikely event of an outage.

“They were not only brilliant when it came to helping us designing and configure our System p servers but also proved invaluable in helping us implement NFS-based Network Attached storage, which proved complex but very beneficial to the solution. Their consultative process and breadth of services expertise also allowed us to explore and identify how we could align our IT systems more closely to our business strategy and operational expenditure. This has enabled us to implement a best-practice blueprint for our IT systems. It allows us to quickly scale without impacting service performance, and, coupled with the help of IBM Global Financing, mitigates financial risk to the business.”

Hallett says the project has developed a very strategic and rock-solid platform to enable Howdens to move forward. He says it has given the Group a very robust, stable and reliable set of systems upon which to build. “We no longer need to worry about the architecture – if we run out of power in one area, we can quickly allocate resource elsewhere without buying more computers. Indeed, we've been able to utilise our new hardware to a much greater extent than we envisaged. It means our capital requirements for IT infrastructure are now very low.”

The Future

Hallett believes Logicalis proved indispensible in helping design and implement Howdens new data centre and in ensuring the seamless handover of the IT services and support so critical to the success of its business going forward.

“When we appointed Logicalis as our IT partner back in 2007, we tasked them with demonstrating ROI on the entire project within 18 months. They have certainly achieved this beyond any shadow of doubt and we are now seeing the benefit financially.

“Since successfully shutting down the Colindale data centre, we have continued to retain them on a technical basis to help us with our new technology. The core architecture they have helped us to put in place is proving very resilient and making it much easier to introduce new applications.

“For instance, we recently completed work on a brand new depot-based EPOS system using the new technology, and we're currently implementing some RedPrairie warehousing and distribution systems. We will certainly continue to involve Logicalis specialists in future projects as we expand and add new systems and processes,” he concludes.

About Galiform: http://www.galiform.com/

About Howden Joinery: http://www.howdens.com/