Bunnings hammers out IBM server deal
Hardware giant Bunnings Group today announced that it has chosen IBM to power its datacentre IT needs in Australia and New Zealand.
(Netapp FAS3170 controller image
by Simon Picken, CC2.0)
The two IBM Power 780 servers will sit in Bunnings' Perth-based datacentre, and support the hardware retailer's 281 locations.
According to a statement from IBM today, the servers Bunnings selected are designed to load balance between each other to ensure that the IT environment can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week — a necessity for Bunnings — according to John Olszewski, the company's IT infrastructure and architecture manager.
"Bunnings is committed to staying ahead of the curve when it comes to best practice use of technology. With the expansion of Bunnings across multiple time zones, building resilience into the IT infrastructure was essential to support the growth of the business and the large growth in processing requirements," Olszewski said.
"We believe this investment will help us to maintain advantage over our competitors and provide the infrastructure that can respond to our planned business expansion," he added.
Bunnings also invested in another IBM XIV Storage System to bolster the secondary datacentre.
Garry D'Orazio, client executive for IBM Australia, said that, in partnership with Datacom, helped Bunnings move to its crucial no-downtime IT environment.
"We are delighted that Bunnings will continue to benefit from IBM's innovation in Power systems with advanced virtualisation capabilities, workload optimisation, scalability, as well as processing horsepower to enable their growth strategy," D'Orazio said.
The roll-out of Bunnings' latest investment in IBM gear is expected to be completed by early next year.