Pizza Hut gets new tech to process online orders

Pizza Hut has enlisted the services of datacentre provider Virtustream to help it handle the one million online orders it receives every week.

The restaurant chain launched an online ordering service four years ago, but it has recently picked up pace, forcing Pizza Hut to move from its previous datacentre, which the company said was no longer adequate for the expected uptick in web site traffic.

"Our previous datacentre was fine for our initial needs, but as we expanded and offered more services to our customers we outgrew it," explained Fawad Shah, network and infrastructure manager at Pizza Hut's parent company, Yum Brands.

"We were not able to receive the high operational availability, fast change management turnaround which our business demanded and most importantly the high level of operational and security compliance that a global brand such as ours would demand and expect from our hosting partner."

He added that other factors were that Pizza Hut was looking to work with a partner who understood its business and had a high-density power capability to accommodate its footprint requirements.

"We also needed a partner that was flexible and easy to work with. If we needed to make a sudden change to our services, our partner would need to action this within hours rather than days or weeks," said Shah.

The firm selected Virtustream as a partner as its datacentre is purpose designed and built meeting high levels of tiered operational capability.

Pizza Hut's infrastructure and managed services partner, SysMicro, helped the firm relocate Hut's legacy infrastructure to the Virtustream datacentre and onto new platforms, which included virtualisation, blade servers and an MPLS network that connects every Pizza Hut outlet and restaurant back to core systems.