Dixons Carphone to migrate to the IBM cloud in a bid to integrate infrastructures

From IBM data centre to IBM Cloud as Dixons Carphone gets to work on integrating two disparate IT infrastructures

Retail chain Dixons Carphone, formed from the £3.8bn merger of Dixons Stores Group and Carphone Warehouse in mid-2014, is planning to migrate its IT infrastructure from outsourced IBM datacentres to the IBM Cloud as part of a project to integrate the two companies' IT infrastructures.

The project is also intended to result in an architecture that can scale more easily and better manage the peaks and troughs of seasonal shopping habits.

The company plans to migrate about 2,500 server images from both, previously separate, organisations, together with supporting database platforms and middleware. The new environment will run on a private IBM Cloud, with bare metal servers for production workloads and the public IBM Cloud for non-production workloads.

While neither Dixons Carphone nor IBM were willing to delve into technical details about the company's IT architecture, and how the two infrastructures would be merged, they did provide the following details:

"Dixons Carphone Group's infrastructure is predominately made up of Windows and Linux operating systems where they host a variety of applications including e-commerce (website), retail systems and back-office systems. IBM will preform a Fit4 assessment against each application profile to assess cloud readiness.

"In terms of infrastructure consolidation, IBM will leverage shared hosted platforms to reduce the footprint such as VMware, Hypervisor, Network Storage and so on - application consolidation is a separate program," claimed a spokesman.

The project will run over the next two years as infrastructure is shifted to the new architecture.

"We know we can trust IBM Cloud to seamlessly integrate the infrastructures of both companies into one hybrid cloud that will enable us to continue focusing on other parts of the business," said David Hennessy, IT director at Dixons Carphone.

The retail chain includes Carphone Warehouse branches specialising in mobile phones, as well as Currys for both brown and white goods' general electrical retail, and PC World, which includes mass-market IT equipment, as well as, increasingly, televisions and games consoles.

The Dixons brand name was largely phased out more than a decade ago.