DIMAR Group boosts resilience and flexibility

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Founded in 1975, DIMAR Group operates in retail, marketing consumer products through a multi-channel distribution network that includes cash and carry, franchising, discount and supermarket operations. With 174 stores and 2,000 employees located mainly in western Liguria and southern Piemonte, DIMAR Group is ready for the rapid and frequent changes that characterize the northern Italian market.

DIMAR Group is expanding rapidly, and there are constant requests from the business to the IT function to provide a data center capable of dynamically supporting the group’s new and ever-increasing business needs. Such needs might refer to increased demands on system performance, resilience and reliability, as well as flexibility in the management of different environments.

Adding more servers and storage devices to the existing infrastructure was an unsustainable approach, therefore DIMAR Group wanted to find a way to meet new market demands, to improve its business continuity and disaster recovery options, and to enable a sustainable long-term growth strategy.

After a careful analysis of the offers provided by its long-term technological partner and other competitors, DIMAR Group chose to deploy an IBM solution. This choice was mainly due to the participation of DIMAR Group in workshops and other specific events, where IBM was able to demonstrate the uniqueness of its solution: being able to create an architecture built in two different sites, centralizing different operating environments (IBM AIX, IBM i, Windows, Linux) on a single virtualized platform.

Each of these environments can sustain its specific application workload, according to the different needs of DIMAR Group’s business units. Computing resources, memory capacity and storage availability can be assigned dynamically to the different applications, using the advanced virtualization and management tools provided by the IBM platform.

This is a single architecture which combines:

• performance (IBM Power Architecture® and IBM X-Architecture®)
• flexibility (multiple environments within a single chassis)
• expandability (through addition of single components)
• security (constantly protected and safe data with advanced deduplication solutions)
• reliability (no single point of failure and ever reliable re-start)

The IBM team also showcased the advantages of IBM BladeCenter, which would allow DIMAR Group to take advantage of the benefits of Power® and Intel-architecture solutions within a single BladeCenter chassis.

The IBM team designed a simple but customized solution based on two IBM BladeCenter H chassis, each with PS701, HX5 and HS22 blades. The chassis have been installed at two different sites, enabling the creation of a high-availability cluster which guarantees an excellent level of operational continuity.

To manage its growing storage needs, DIMAR Group replaced its existing storage devices with two IBM System Storage DS5100 arrays, which provide optimized storage for DIMAR Group’s demanding applications. The company uses the built-in synchronous and asynchronous replication services to copy data between locations to ensure that there is always one copy of critical information available.

IBM also installed and configured the switches that connect the two data centers. The result is a solution that, benefitting from a high level of automation, ensures the reliable and seamless execution of business operations.

Data is backed up to IBM System Storage TS3200 tape libraries using IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager. An IBM System Storage TS7650 ProtecTIER® Deduplication Appliance acts as a virtual tape library to reduce the total amount of data stored and to accelerate backup and recovery. Deploying IBM PowerVM enables DIMAR Group to achieve higher resource utilization. PowerVM also provides enormous flexibility, allowing DIMAR Group to move processing resources between virtual servers to match changing demand patterns.

The twin IBM BladeCenter and DS5100 systems located at each data center support DIMAR Group’s disaster recovery and resilience requirements. The IBM solution optimizes the group’s use of IT resources, improving service and boosting the return on investment (ROI). The availability and resiliency of the IT environment have been maximized and maintenance, management, energy consumption and hardware footprint costs have been reduced.

Moving to a fully virtualized server infrastructure on BladeCenter has reduced the number of physical servers from 50 to four IBM blades, and reduced energy costs by around 90 percent. The simplified server infrastructure, with fewer physical network and SAN connections, has helped DIMAR cut IT management costs by 50 percent. The IBM solution includes comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities, allowing DIMAR to lower its operational risk.