Nisa-Today's gets infrastructure refresh

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Nisa-Today's, the UK's largest buying group for independent retail and wholesale companies, has update its legacy IBM Power4-based UNIX and Oracle 9i IT infrastructure to speed order processing times and reduce the risk of downtime.

It decided to overhaul and update its infrastructure as demand on its UNIX AIX5.1-based systems, running Oracle 9i database, application server and retail management systems (RMS), an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application with a focus on merchandise planning and order capture system (OCS) was growing.

Wayne Swallow, IT director at Nisa-Today's explained that customers place orders with by noon for an overnight delivery to Nisa's distribution sites. The OCS application takes order information from the web interface, telesales staff and the electronic point-of-sale (EPoS) system.

"We have a limited turn around on all orders of about 35 minutes if we are going to get them to the correct suppliers and ensure next day delivery and consolidation," he said. "Our systems were starting to show signs of strain under the increasing number of customers and therefore orders we were dealing with. It was imperative that we dealt with this and reduced batch processing time to ensure the system continued to meet business needs."

Nisa IT systems' hosting and management supplier, Attenda brought in business and IT consultancy, Morse to project manage and implement the IT infrastructure upgrade that was completed earlier this year.

Nisa-Today's was able to ensure that the performance of its business critical applications remained stable under the pressure of growing customer numbers and orders, by standardising on and optimising the use of IBM P Series servers, as well as upgrading its Oracle 9i infrastructure to Oracle 10g. It also consolidated the existing infrastructure into four physical servers and a single storage array.

A virtualised server solution was suggested. But, with the existing solution established on IBM and UNIX, it was decided that a switch to Intel/Linux based virtualisation would have introduced significant project and business risk.

As a result, Nisa-Today's rolled out hypervisor virtualisation technology from IBM. Combining Power5 and AIX 5.3 architecture upgrades allowed them to apply micro partitioning across the server pool and therefore share processing capabilities to improve scalability and reliability.

Nisa-Today's now has a more flexible IT environment as server resources are shared and can therefore be used by applications on demand. This enabled the company to significantly reduce batch processing time.

"We are now able to process orders 20-30 times faster than before. Not only are we processing orders in 10 minutes, much shorter than the maximum time limit we have to adhere to, but it is also much easier to cater for the growing number of users," said Swallow.

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