Oddbins makes a case for consolidation with IBM System i and System x

Oddbins, a specialist retailer of wine and spirits, manages 245 outlets across the UK, employs around 2,000 people and generates annual revenues of £180 million. With the majority of its stores located on the high street, Oddbins is now expanding into the retail park environment and looking to increase online sales.

“Oddbins is in a highly competitive market,” explains Bob Smyllie, Head of IS & Logistics at Oddbins. “Nevertheless, with our superior range and knowledge, we have always been able to meet the challenge posed by other specialist retailers.”

Having stores on the high street has many advantages, but some shoppers are put off by the lack of parking facilities nearby. To provide these potential customers with other purchasing channels, the development of larger out-of-town stores and online shopping facilities was a must.

“The new Web site was a particularly important part of our overall strategy, and required a complete rethink of our IT environment,” says Bob Smyllie. “We needed better performance from our hardware infrastructure, not only for the Web site itself, but also for all the back-end systems. Oddbins prides itself on the wide range of wines and spirits it offers customers, but this makes supply chain management a highly complex proposition. It was becoming too much for our existing systems to handle.”


Replacing vintage systems

Oddbins was using three reliable but ageing IBM AS/400 servers to handle development and production systems, with a JDA IDEAS data warehouse and JDA MMS merchandise management software. JD Edwards World handled the company’s finances. Disk usage on all three machines was very high – as much as 92 per cent on the main production server – and transactional processing could take most of the night.

The company also ran a number of systems under Microsoft^® Windows^® on 18 Intel^®-based servers, incurring a significant management workload, taking up considerable space in the server room, and leading to inflated power and air conditioning costs.


The spirit of partnership

Oddbins went to tender before choosing Triangle, an IBM Premier Business Partner, to design, develop and deploy a solution. Triangle (www.triangle-group.com) is recognised as a leading organisation in pioneering business-changing solutions, and is dedicated to providing cutting-edge support for the IBM server platforms.

“Triangle’s pre-sales support was very good – they listened to our needs and took pains to explain all the pros and cons of each of the suggested solutions,” says Bob Smyllie. “We were convinced by their expertise with IBM hardware. What most impressed us was the organisation behind Triangle’s bid. Oddbins is a large company, and we needed our partner to be able to provide true enterprise-level support.”

Triangle proposed migrating the three AS/400s to three logical partitions (LPARs) on a single IBM System i5 520 platform. Consolidation of the ‘Wintel’ environment would also begin, moving core systems such as Microsoft Exchange, file/print, DHCP and Citrix servers to three IBM System x model 346 servers, each containing one 2.8GHz Intel Xeon processor and 512MB RAM, attached to the i520 via an IBM Integrated xSeries Adapter (IXA).

“IXA enables us to divorce processing from storage hardware, making it easy to swap components in and out if something fails,” comments Bob Smyllie. “We can also pool storage and devices for our Windows environment in a way that was never possible before. We now use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to back up all the Windows servers, which is much faster and easier than backing up each machine separately.”

Backing up data from the i520 is simpler too – instead of the AS/400s and their three separate tape devices, Oddbins now uses the IBM LPAR toolkit, Advanced Job Scheduler and BRMS to back up all three partitions to a single IBM 3582 Ultrium 2 Tape Library.

“Overall, backup times are much improved and require considerably less manual input, saving time for the IT team,” says Bob Smyllie. “Combined with the increased performance of the new solution, this means that we no longer have to worry about getting through the nightly transaction processing in time.”


Uncorking bottlenecks

By consolidating its hardware infrastructure to the System i5 platform, Oddbins has improved IT performance across the board, reducing transactional processing bottlenecks and ensuring that its online shop is supported effectively by back-end systems. Better online performance means better customer service, facilitating Oddbins’ expansion into a new marketplace.

Consolidation has also helped reduce workload for IT staff in terms of server administration, maintenance and backups, and has helped to cut electricity and air conditioning requirements while freeing up space in the server room. Since some of Oddbins’ applications are charged per processor, licensing costs have been reduced as well.

“Our cost-benefit analysis showed the financial advantages of consolidation so clearly that the decision to move to the System i5 platform was obvious,” says Bob Smyllie. “Our strategy now is to consolidate the rest of our Intel server farm as soon as possible, to improve operational efficiency even further.

“Moving to the System i5 platform and leveraging System x and IXA technologies gives Oddbins an infrastructure which is easy to manage, simple to maintain and provides the high performance environment we need, all at a comparatively low total cost of ownership,” he concludes.