Lewis opts for Dell customised server solution

Lewis Stores, one of the largest independent domestic retailers in southern Africa, recently selected Dell Computer South Africa to provide a customised server solution, comprising of the Dell PowerEdge 600 server running Linux, to its 450 branches throughout southern Africa.

IT director at Lewis Stores, Charles Irwin, comments: "Geography plays a major role in any upgrade to the IT infrastructure serving each store. The logistics and associated costs of rolling out more than 400 servers over such a wide area are extremely challenging.

"To replace a server machine in an outlet requires that there be less than 30 to 40 minutes of downtime. Typically a customer will come into the branch and want to buy a piece of furniture. If he can`t have it then he`ll walk next door and buy it from our competitor. As 90% of purchasing is done on credit through a customised system that makes `on-the-spot` credit decisions, any kind of downtime loses us revenue."

Irwin says that after considering all the available options, he was most impressed by Dell South Africa`s solution.

"Dell could get the product we needed to our stores at the right time from a central location. In the performance testing, Dell measured very favourably, and thanks to Dell`s Custom Factory Integration service, we could deploy the hardware with the necessary operating system and our custom software completely installed and configured out of the box, which was a huge time and cost saving to the group."

To date Lewis has installed nearly 400 Dell PowerEdge 600 servers running Linux and the in-house application that takes care of the day to day running of a Lewis outlet.

"The actual switchover was done to an extremely tight roll-out schedule with virtually no problems in the entire process," says Irwin. "At the branch all that had to be done was shut the old server down, take it out, put the Dell in, switch it on and continue as normal. We did the majority of this operation during August-September 2002 and the switchover was critical for each store because of the downtime issue."

Irwin adds that Dell`s onsite warranty offered Lewis significant savings.

"Having a next business day onsite warranty included as part of the deal makes a great deal of financial sense to us because of the associated costs of keeping things running. As you can imagine, having stores in extremely remote locations poses many challenges. But the most important thing is that there is a single point of contact at Dell. We don`t have to go to multiple people in different companies to get issues sorted out."