The Foschini Group (TFG), trading since 1924, is freeing itself of legacy systems and is moving to a virtualised environment for greater efficiency and cost savings.
TFG Infotec, the IT service division for the entire group, has been upgrading and virtualising the group's infrastructure in a programme that began as far back as 2008.
Jurgen Richter, TFG Infotec's infrastructure executive, says that, with 17 retail brands, over 1 800 stores and more than 15 000 staff in the group, the IT infrastructure has to deliver agile, seamless and highly available computing across the country. The group's IT division also needed to support TFG's goals, which include supply chain optimisation, store optimisation, ongoing expansion and a greater customer focus.
An Infrastructure Framework was formulated in 2008 that mapped business requirements back into the IT infrastructure. Using a business criticality matrix, the most critical business services were architected, at an infrastructure layer, into a continuously available service that continues to operate even after a building failure; server and storage virtualisation forms a foundation for this architecture.
ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Summit 2012
In today's cut-throat business environment, it is essential to innovate in order to remain competitive. One such innovation is adopting cloud services in order to realise efficient service and performance. ITWeb's Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Summit takes place from 17 to 19 July 2012. For more information and to reserve your seat, click here.
Some of the key principles of the Infrastructure Framework include aligning IT to business requirements, hardware abstraction, shared but still logically isolated infrastructure, capacity-on-demand, continual cost optimisation, continual service availability improvement, and commoditised and standardised building components.
Effectively, Infotec has been building a private cloud over the last few years without the “pay-as-you-go” charge-back mechanism to the business. The journey to this private cloud is still a work in progress, but much of the group's infrastructure is now managed as a private cloud. Richter says TFG has benefited by curbing data centre power costs, eliminating downtime and avoiding the need to build a third data centre for the group last year.
He concedes there have been challenges to overcome, and the move necessitated changes in IT operations management and skills requirements.
“We have learnt a lot,” he says. “For example, traditional siloed IT teams don't work anymore - now you need a data centre team. The network, storage and server teams need to work extremely closely together. Isolated patch management within the data centre can lead to instability; a change on the storage layer can impact your entire data centre. Every layer of the virtual data centre stack must be included and viewed holistically.”
Another challenge has been the exponentially growing storage needs, as it becomes very easy and fast to provision new server environments. Richter says the group is now implementing database compression technologies and storage thin provisioning to reduce storage utilisation and growth.
TFG is also looking at moving commoditised and non-business-critical services into the cloud; certain components of messaging are also being researched.
“However, critical and core business services will be kept in our data centres for the foreseeable future, for the purposes of governance and security,” he says.
Richter will address the upcoming ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Summit on TFG's move to cloud computing. For more information about this event, click here.
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