Shopper's Stop : Unified Storage

Shopper's Stop was using a 3 year old iSCSI/NFS based storage infrastructure

which was limiting the company's ability to expand the storage and deploy IO

intensive applications. Company was also finding bottlenecks in its

virtualization infrastructure. The old storage infrastructure was 3 years old

and limited the company's ability to deploy resource intensive applications and

increase data storage capability. The IT team was facing challenges in

maintaining an increasing number of inventory of tapes, test them periodically

and discard the tapes according to their life.

Shopper's Stop have implemented a Unified Storage system with multi-protocol

support so that it can cater to a wide variety of services and applications.

Considering the future growth the company has decided to implement EMC Unified

Storage for its storage needs. The storage system now offers FC/ iSCSI & NFS

protocol which are used according to the needs of various applications.

Shopper's Stop has also deployed iOmega NAS storage for store backups. This

helps in IP based storage device, Active Directory integration for centralized

access control, management and single sign-on, centralized monitoring for

availability and backup monitoring, multiple servers sharing the backup device,

faster backups compared to tape, and faster recovery in case of a server crash.

A storage migration typically means major downtime or outages. However, VMware

live motion was used to migrate servers without downtime.