Topping up data needs

Domino's Pizza is planning to move and upgrade its datacentre to keep up with the pace of its rapidly expanding business

Domino’s Pizza’s datacentre is as crammed as the toppings on one of the company’s pizzas, reflecting the rapid growth of the fast-food firm that is opening about 50 stores per year.

Aside from its expansion on the high street ­ there are now more than 450 stores throughout the UK ­ the company’s online presence has also grown and 15 per cent of all orders are now made on the web, up from 10 per cent 18 months ago. Such expansion creates increasing pressure on the datacentre.

Last year internet sales reached £23m and the company responded to customer demand by focusing on its e-commerce channels and using 15 new media platforms, such as search marketing and a virtual store on Second Life.

“Our datacentre is not huge ­ it has about 48 servers ­ but it is incredibly important because of our web site and it has increased 100 per cent in size over the past 12 months,” says Domino’s IT director Jane Kimberlin.

“It looks very compact with lots of servers in the physical space, but we use advanced technology to keep it running efficiently.”

Despite running an efficient datacentre, the company will have to build a new facility in the near future and is already planning for the eventuality ­ – see Key business process below.

“Because of Domino’s rapid growth, in two to three years’ time we will have to move to a larger site as our Milton Keynes headquarters is very close to full capacity. We will then create a new datacentre,” says Kimberlin.

The datacentre is run in-house, bucking the current trend of outsourcing datacentre activities to cut time, management, power and capital costs.

And Kimberlin sees no need to change to an outsourced model with the move. “We will most likely keep our datacentre in-house because of our history of rapid growth,” she says. “Outsourcing the datacentre would make more sense if we were not facing further growth and change because it is hard to build that into a contract that is acceptable to both parties.”

She says that technology could change, and managing the datacentre internally means the firm can be more flexible about incorporating new systems.

“A third party would not so easily accept the risk of change presented by Domino’s growth strategy, and you cannot be so open about what is needed if your datacentre is run by a third party,” says Kimberlin.

She also appreciates the benefits of having a strong working relationship with Domino’s infrastructure manager Phil Thompson, something Kimberlin says could not be replicated if Domino’s began outsourcing.

“Our systems are so important to us that we want to keep them internally to maintain that level of commitment. Our datacentre is near full capacity, and Phil’s team is very good at juggling when necessary as they live and breathe the business,” she says.

Although Kimberlin says outsourcing is often portrayed as a cheaper way of running a datacentre, she says a recent review challenged that assumption. “Some 18 months ago, an audit found that the turnover of our business versus the cost of IT was favourable,” she says.

A technology that Domino’s has used, and is keen to roll out further to keep down costs, is virtualisation software, which enables more efficient use of existing hardware.

Domino’s has been using Dell hardware since signing a contract with the supplier in 2003 and is using VMware’s virtualisation software on Dell servers.

“We have used virtualisation in our testing environment and are now assessing its potential on some of our live applications,” says Kimberlin.

When the new datacentre is built there are already plans in place to make wider use of efficient and green technologies, such as virtualisation.

“We want to create a datacentre that is as green as possible and we have a high-level budget for the new environment. We are looking at options on the space and power side and Dell’s Energy Smart range of servers in conjunction with virtualisation software will potentially play an important role,” says Kimberlin.

The new datacentre will also have a storage area network (SAN) which connects multiple servers to a centralised pool of disc storage, and Domino’s is in the initial stages of replacing its current SAN.

“We need to replace the SAN before we move to the new building as part of our upgrade cycle,” says Kimberlin.

Domino’s is looking at how to combine the pricier but faster fibre channel with internet SCSI (iSCSI), the IP-based standard used for linking data storage devices over a network and enabling the transfer of data by carrying SCSI commands over IP networks.