Scots co-op virtualises servers and storage

Food-to-funeral outfit upgrades its disaster recovery system and consolidates servers

Scotmid, one of Scotland's biggest co-op based retailers, has consolidated its server numbers from 25 to five and upgraded its disaster recovery system at its Edinburgh head office.

The firm (Scottish Midland Co-operative Society) has over 4,200 staff working across 260 food stores and grooming products outlets and runs one of Scotland's largest funeral services.

It installed five IBM X3850 servers running VMware, 21 terabyes of IBM n5300 clustered filer storage SnapMirror, SnapRestore, SnapManager for SQL, iSCSI, Snapdrive for Windows, an IBM TS3310 Tape Library (including six LTO 3 drives); and Tivoli Storage Manager.

Scott Kerr, head of IT at SCOTMID, said “We needed extra storage to support a huge new database as our existing datacentre had reached maximum capacity. Also, as our head office is based close to Edinburgh airport we also wanted to ensure that our disaster recovery strategy was as robust as possible.”

“We now have the ability to implement a robust disaster recovery system and the capability to provide multiple backups and distributed storage that will support our future growth. We now also have the ability to host the large volumes of data a retailer needs in their MIS systems to drive sales and improve customer service."

Supplier B2Net ran the project.