Post on 01-Aug-2018
“Overall we are delighted with the results of the migration to the new Logicalis Cloud platform. We have certainly noticed significant improvements in performance, and in the scope of analysis we are now able to carry out”
Abid Quyum, Database Manager, John Lewis
Partnership
John Lewis Partnership Customer Database migrates onto the Logicalis Cloud platform
The John Lewis Partnership is a visionary and successful way of doing business, boldly putting the happiness of Partners at the centre of everything it does. All 76,500 permanent employees are Partners who share the benefits of ownership of 35 John Lewis shops across the UK, 266 Waitrose supermarkets, an online and catalogue business, johnlewis.com, a production unit and a farm with a turnover of nearly £8.2 billion last year. Partners share in the benefits and profits of a business that puts them first.
The Challenge
For over 10 years Logicalis has provided a managed
service for the Partnership Customer Database (PCD). This
database provides a single view of all customers across the
Partnership including full point of sale transaction history
from both Waitrose and John Lewis stores.
The Oracle data warehouse hosting this data supports a
variety of applications used by the Partnership’s business
development team to drive marketing campaigns and
provide insight and analysis, affecting decisions as diverse
as in-store product placement and new store locations. The
Oracle database and the applications it supports are hosted
by Logicalis under the managed service.
Logicalis is also responsible for ongoing database
development and data acceptance and integration within the
Partnership, responding to the ever-changing demands of
the business development team and their internal customers.
With the renewal of the managed service contract the objective
of the team was to improve system performance and data
storage capacity, whilst simultaneously reducing the cost of
the service to the Partnership.
Case Study: John Lewis Partnership
The Solution
As a result, the managed service for the PCD was migrated
onto the Logicalis Cloud platform as a hosted service,
delivered from Logicalis’ High Density Data Centre.
By utilising the advanced technology underpinning the
Logicalis Cloud, including Cisco Unified Computing System
(UCS), NetApp storage, and software from CA Technologies,
a set of disparate software tools forming a single business
solution can share a common infrastructure, platform and SLA.
The Cloud platform includes Logicalis’ secure ‘Virtual
Container’ technology. The Virtual Container includes bare-
metal servers provisioned using Cisco UCS service profiles,
allowing the varied virtualised and traditional operating
systems to share the same platform and portability. This
includes test as well as production instances of the Oracle
database and all associated applications, running on Oracle
Enterprise Linux, with VMware virtualisation for Microsoft
Windows-based applications.
Being hypervisor and platform independent, the Logicalis
Cloud has the ability to support the mixture of native high
performance database platforms running directly on server
hardware, with virtualised servers on the same Cloud platform
offering the same high levels of resilience and security.
Migration of the PCD managed service from its previous
platform to the Cloud included an Oracle database upgrade,
migration of the operating system from AIX to Linux and
Windows, and the physical migration of the database itself.
In addition, Oracle’s Grid Control enterprise management
solution was deployed to give further insight into database
performance and facilitate ongoing administration.
Through a combination of careful planning, comprehensive
testing and extensive dry runs, the entire migration, although
complex, was achieved with no downtime to the customer
during business hours, and data currency was maintained at
expected levels throughout.
Key Benefits
As a result of the re-platforming and data migration, the
database performance (which is critical to the performance
of all of the supported applications) has improved on average
approximately threefold. Queries that previously were not
practical due to their complexity and the volume of data
processed now complete reliably and with acceptable
response times, dramatically improving the business
development team’s ability to derive insight and intelligence
from the wealth of data available.
The cloud platform underpinning this has not only increased
performance, but also dramatically increased service levels
allowing the virtualised and non-virtualised environment to
share a common platform, SLA, and resilience.
Logicalis UK Ltd
110 Buckingham Avenue, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4PF
T: 01753 777200 F: 01753 777203
What can we do for your organisation? Visit: www.uk.logicalis.com