Unipart Logistics is moving towards a virtual storage environment to maximise its server investment and gain fast access to business critical data.
The company supplies products to 74 countries from 20 worldwide warehouse locations, and specialises in delivering integrated logistics and business services to a large range of customers including Jaguar, Boots, and Homebase.
A complex supply chain operation meant the firm ran business applications across a large and disparate server environment.
As increasing information volumes began to impinge on customer service delivery, Unipart decided to consolidate its server environment onto an infrastructure which would improve data management and availability.
Driving this need was an extension to 2013 of the global contract with Jaguar for supplying motor parts. Unipart handles more than 17,000 orders a day for the car company, and most of the information was held on individual servers.
To ensure systems did not fail and to avoid high maintenance costs, Unipart decided to move away from a direct attached storage environment and deploy a scalable, networked storage infrastructure for better information management. At the same time, it also decided to upgrade its SAP environment, and selected storage specialist EMC to support this move.
EMC’s Symmetrix storage and IBM servers were chosen to provide a platform for meeting increasing business demands. The system went live in March 2005.
‘We were aiming to run 13 service level agreements (SLAs) – but we were only hitting nine,’ says Unipart services integration manager Duncan Mountjoy.
‘We wanted to avoid a big uplift in maintenance costs and support increasing business demands, so factored in scalability to meet growth projections. We also moved to mySAP and chose EMC as the best storage platform.
‘It was quite a complicated business case, but we decided to focus on a roadmap beyond 2013 which would avoid step changes and decrease operational costs. Now we have no problem meeting SLAs.’
The company also considered its long-term data management and decided it needed to give value to information to manage it more effectively, so implemented an information lifecycle management strategy.
‘We evaluated tiering of information, putting data on the most appropriate platform so that you can gain the cost benefits of using disk while putting business-critical data on super-high-performance storage technology,’ says Mountjoy.
Supplier Computacenter assessed Unipart’s back-office IT systems and EMC undertook a data classification and information management project. EMC’s
VisualSRM software assessed Unipart’s information use and allocated value to the data generated by the company’s SAP system.
The VisualSRM software, which reports trends, automates storage policies and provides live analysis of storage needs, allowed Unipart to assess how storage was being used across the business unit supporting Jaguar to determine the most effective way to manage information and storage resources.
Following the assessment, Unipart decided to consolidate its storage system across a number of business units, and implement a tiered storage strategy.
Unipart also plans to deploy VMware software which will partition physical servers into multiple virtual machines.
‘We are in the process of virtualisation of our server and storage networks. We will use VMware to create a virtual server environment and optimise our investment in IBM servers,’ says Mountjoy.
He says this move will enable Unipart to provision storage across its servers, reducing risk of failure and lowering overall management costs. Unipart is in the process of implementing its tiered storage strategy.
Mountjoy says that classifying data is time-consuming because of the number of considerations, which include looking at data volumes, determining the business criticality of data, determining what data is less business critical, finding a more cost-effective system to store it which can still be accessed, and looking at backup procedures.
Unipart is also setting policies to support information lifecycle management. ‘Policies must be written and endorsed in such a way so they take effect automatically to remove the choice element, but they must work with the business, such as the need to retain legal and financial data. A balance must be struck between business needs, practicalities and cost,’ said Mountjoy.
In the future, he says virtualisation will allow Unipart to make savings by allowing business units not associated with Jaguar to have their data hosted on the EMC environment.
‘The shared environment will be structured to maintain the integrity of clients’ data, and Unipart can gain economies of scale,’ says Mountjoy.
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