Shoppers Stop growing Dynamic with VMware!
2010-10-22Founded in October 1991 by K. Raheja Corp., the Shoppers Stop retail group operates a chain of 29 department stores and five hypermarkets under the brand name HyperCITY in 12 cities across India. Listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the retail group also runs three stores under the Homestop brand and several stores catering for niche demand under brands such as Mothercare and Crossword. The organization has more than 5,000 employees.
In mid-2007, Shoppers Stop faced more than 25 of its servers reaching end-of-life, while management also wanted to reduce datacenter power, cooling and real estate requirements. The retail group was planning to consolidate its IT infrastructure from three sites to one co-located datacenter to lower costs and improve manageability. "The consolidation programme gave us an opportunity to refresh our infrastructure and we were aware of what virtualization could deliver after monitoring the technology for more than three years," said Gopakumar Panicker, Senior Manager at Shoppers Stop.
After conducting a thorough evaluation, Shoppers Stop concluded that VMware provided the only "fully evolved" virtualization product suite in the market. "As we provide shared infrastructure services to multiple business units within Shoppers Stop, we receive a large number of server provisioning requests," said Panicker. "It was important we implemented an infrastructure that could allow us to meet these needs quickly and reliably. VMware fulfilled the brief exceptionally well."
Shoppers Stop engaged VMware Partner Sunfire Technologies Pvt. Ltd. to install VMware vSphere 4 and is running about 55 virtual machines on four host servers supported by a networked storage system. "Sunfire performed admirably, with their consultants demonstrating strong technical ability and a deep understanding of VMware's products," said Panicker. With the new infrastructure fully established, Shoppers Stop now plans to extend virtualization to servers located on-site at stores and provide disaster recovery for critical applications.
"With the Shoppers Stop retail group being in expansion mode, opening new retail stores requires us to add capacity and provision servers quickly. Thanks to VMware, the IT team can respond quickly to requests from the business and contribute to a dynamic, growing organization," adds Anil Shankar, General Manager, Solutions & Technology Team, Shoppers Stop Ltd.
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