Acquisitions push Co-op IT consolidation

Co-op embarks on a mammouth datacentre operation

The Co-operative Group's 330-strong IT team is likely to be kept busy for some years to come thanks to its recent round of high-profile mergers and acquisitions, including Somerfield and the Britannia Building Society.

Ian Dyson, the Group's director of trading group information services, has already spent the past couple of years managing the consolidation of systems inherited from CGW's merger with United Co-operatives in 2007, and is planning more upgrades for the future.

How is the Co-op Group's IT revamp progressing?
Ian Dyson: It is a mammoth exercise involving datacentres, servers, networks, desktops, Active Directory – the lot. One of the key decisions we made was to virtualise our servers and introduce HP blade systems into our datacentres, and we are about 75 per cent complete. It is the ones that are more difficult to finish that are left until the end, and they might take us another couple of years. United Co-operatives was already using VMWare on about 60 physical servers, so we had some experience there, and following the merger we took it to the next level.

What benefits have you noticed so far?
Server virtualisation has helped us reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and speed up our ability to spin up new services and applications for our users. The Group encompasses a host of different businesses with many different requirements, so it is important for us to be able to provide additional services, storage capacity, and new test environments as quickly as we can.

What made you build a new secondary datacentre?
The stability of the existing infrastructure was not ideal and we were reaching capacity at our datacentre in Salford. We also needed to address disaster recovery and business continuity, and there is the green aspect as well. We decided to build a new datacentre on the ground floor of an existing Group office in Rochdale, installing our own generators and UPS, and using the latest water cooling technology for high-density blade server racks. It is remotely managed by our own IT staff.

How have you managed to reduce costs?
There are two elements: previously, we had two individual contracts covering our legacy estate, which has now been reduced to one. We also know we are drawing far less power in the datacentre.

Do you have any other plans for virtualisation?
We are also piloting desktop virtualisation [downloading virtual machines stored on servers to thin client PCs] using Citrix XenApp. It is currently being extended to around 200 users in preparation for the opening of our new Manchester head office in 2012. We expect desktop virtualisation to deliver further TCO reductions compared with the cost of using desktop PCs because thin clients use less power. It will also significantly increase the flexibility of how staff work, because virtual desktops can be migrated from floor to floor, office to office, and to people working from home. It will also help us secure our data, build a more resilient infrastructure, and give us better control of software utilisation.

Any other projects on the go?
We are actively seeking a site for a primary datacentre and implementing a complete infrastructure rebuild that will see the consolidation of six email platforms, serving 12,000 users, into one. We are also introducing an Avaya IP telephony system for the first time to replace legacy private branch exchanges acquired over a number of years, both here and in our head office in Manchester. I also have my eye on introducing unified communications.