Storage case study: Domino's Pizza

Domino's needed a SAN upgrade to support its expansion plans

Domino’s Pizza opens about 50 new stores per year in the UK and Ireland and has implemented a storage infrastructure to accommodate the associated increase in data, so information can be analysed to drive further sales.

“We have 576 stores and are on track for just over 600 shops by the end of 2009,” says IT director Jane Kimberlin.

“We are aiming to have 1,000 shops by 2017 and with this growth pattern, we need to have the capacity to add more data as storage use is growing on average at a rate of 10 per cent per annum,” she says.

“The importance of retail is in the detail and the ability to analyse data to find the sales patterns that emerge with the impact of different variables, such as promotions, the weather and if Britain’s Got Talent is on television.”

Before the pizza delivery company deployed its business intelligence system last year, it ensured its storage infrastructure was robust enough to hold the company data for in-depth analysis by upgrading its storage area network (SAN).

“Our previous SAN had 3TB capacity and we replaced it with a new 7.5TB SAN that has the capacity to grow to 150TB before we have to replace it within three to five years. We will need to store increasing amounts of information including much more electronic data such as photos, which requires a lot of capacity,” says Kimberlin.

Domino’s is a Dell user and replaced its old Dell SAN, which lasted five years, with an EMC SAN supplied by Dell, but Kimberlin considered alternatives.

“We looked at other suppliers, but we understand the technology. The Dell SAN has very good reporting tools to help us investigate volumes and any issues,” she says.

She believes it is important to keep abreast of new technologies, but to choose the right storage to fit the business.

“Technologies such as solid state storage may be right for a bank, but we are a retail business and I do not want to buy technology for technology’s sake. We have the appropriate technology for our business, which is robust and flexible so that we don’t have to think about replacing it every six months,” says Kimberlin.

The IT director consulted with the business before deciding what storage infrastructure to implement.

“Understanding what the business needs are and matching capacity against that is essential to achieving a solid storage infrastructure,” says Kimberlin. “Archiving data into tiers and not wasting too much time getting people to delete information works for us and I would recommend not taking risks such as choosing a storage company that may not be around in the next five years.”