How Shopper's Stop Fixed Storage and 'SPARKED' Off Business
A case study on Storage in RetailReader ROI
Executive Summary
Shopper's Stop faced the challenge of how to predict data growth and stay ahead of the curve and upgrade the storage infrastructure with minimal impact on the business. The answer came in the form of SPARK. It assists the business group capture all the data related to properties clearly and scientifically, and assists them making properties decisions using analysis and comparison methods.
Ask the CIO of a retail business about his worst nightmare and he'll probably say storage management. To avoid under-provisioning - and holding up the business - many CIOs over-provision, which is a safe, if expensive, way to deal with the problem Arun Gupta, the CTO of the Rs 1,210-crore Shoppers Stop, was one of those CIOs, until recently. He has since learnt the art of systematically adding juice to his storage boxes in order to avoid a data deluge. He's found a way to do that, too. Gupta and his team not only doubled their storage capacity from about 7TB to over 15TB for their SAN and NAS ecosystem but also deployed a data-intensive business development application for real estate management.
Case Study Highlights
Shoppers Stop's meteoric rise to a house-hold name is partially because of the number of outlets it has. But driven by aggressive plans to expand even more, has increased the use of Shoppers Stop's current apps - and the need for new ones. Traditionally, the enterprise used direct attached storage but that offered limited scalability options. It resulted in the underutilization of storage resources in some pools, while others were running short. Simultaneously, backing up data (it took between eight to nine hours) was becoming an insurmountable problem. "We needed a scalable and flexible solution to meet the demand for storage while keeping the TCO low and protecting existing investment," says Gopakumar Panicker, senior manager, solutions and technology team at Shoppers Stop.
Shoppers Stop created a separate division. It's business development team is responsible for identifying and evaluating properties where Shoppers Stop can open stores in any of its 15 retail formats. Members of the business team worked on the Excel spreadsheets and faced many challenges because of the fast-changing nature of the real estate business. What they needed was a centralized repository of site data and property evaluation matrices. The business team turned to IT for help. "When everyone else was on a signing spree with the real estate owners and agents, we realized that we needed a systematic approach.That would require revamping the storage infrastructure. This would also aid other applications," recalls Gupta, "Hence, the Project SPARK (System for Property Acquisition, Research and Knowledge-sharing) was born."
An unified storage solution from NetApp was selected after thorough evaluation. "The unified solution eliminated the need to implement separate solutions for both SAN and NAS. This ensured better TCO across the implementation," says Panicker. The storage in the SAN and NAS ecosystem was upgraded incrementally from 7.8TB to 15.3TB over six months. The first acquisition of storage technologies occurred about 18 months ago. This increased the total storage space to about 30TB. In addition to this, the data warehouse 10TB of capacity and the AS400 server has 5TB.
Project SPARK successfully continues its data-crunching with the help of new the storage ecosystem, and aids the organization optimize its property acquisition process, which can now store a larger number parameters and has the ability to review past decisions. Thanks to project SPARK, the turnaround time to approve or reject a piece of property is now two days - from 10 days earlier.
The Person Behind It
We are able to address the requirement for quicker turnaround time for application rollout with a flexible and scalable solution.”
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