Sears Canada

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Growing steadily through a multichannel strategy that delivers annual revenues of 7.6 billion CAD (6.6 billion USD), Sears Canada and its 41,000 employees are dedicated to satisfying customers with products and services of superior value. However, with 36 terabytes of data under management and 30 percent data growth per year, the company's IT infrastructure became overtaxed, making it difficult to deliver quality customer service. The batch processing of customer transactions, for example, periodically exceeded windows. This had the undesired effect of preventing some credit card sales during morning hours until the processing was completed, causing significant losses for the company. The growth in data also caused a proliferation of racks devoted to storage arrays, tapes and other devices. Data center floor space dwindled and costs associated with shipping large numbers of tape cartridges to an offsite vault took an upturn. Additionally, enterprise disk utilization rates were low due to the over-allocation of storage required to meet new end-user project needs.

To better utilize resources, reduce costs and improve its customer service, the Sears Canada IT group selected Sun StorageTek FlexLine Shared Virtual Array (SVA) disk system (V960) to optimize the use of its system-managed storage pool. The company is using the virtual volumes of the SVA to dynamically allocate storage to end-user projects as required, as opposed to its previous method of guessing at allocations. The company also deployed Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system back-ended by five Sun StorageTek T9840 tape drives. This allowed the IT team to implement storage consolidation projects.

With its Sun virtualization solution, Sears Canada has reduced batch processing time by up to 85 percent, eliminating lost revenues resulting from morning overruns. The solution also slashed cartridge media consumption by 75 percent to save 200,000 USD annually. Dynamic allocation has eliminated the guesswork that led to over-allocation of disk capacity, enabling Sears to lower IT expenditures by deferring the purchase of additional capacity. In addition, the virtual volumes have freed up badly needed floor space. The data compression capabilities of the VSM and the V960 systems have reduced the number of tapes from thousands to hundreds and liberated 9,600 CPU minutes per year. In fact, the IT team was able to delay processor purchases and apply CPU minutes to high-value activities.

Sears Canada is now positioned to grow its business and its data volume without causing data center sprawl. As Sears broadens the diversity of its specialized services and shopping options, the company can count on having its applications available when they are needed to do business.