SCIENCE

IBM has announced that Bunnings has selected POWER7 technology to provide a robust environment to support plans for rapid business growth across the region.

Located in Perth, the new system will support Bunnings' 281 locations across Australia and New Zealand and is expected to save and improve their data center operational efficiencies by significantly reducing power usage and improving cooling, reducing server footprint, and increasing operational productivity, delivering on their solid sustainability approach in doing business.

With the company continuing to annually grow its store network with additional stores in Australia and New Zealand, Bunnings realized increased processing power was required to support such rapid growth and handle rising capacity constraints.  The growth of its core business systems meant that the organization required a robust and efficient 24 hours a day, 7 days a week processing environment.

Bunnings selected two IBM Power 780 servers because of the hardware's workload optimization ability and high system availability. With the new server environment, Bunnings can load balance between each server, ensuring scheduled and unscheduled maintenance can be conducted with no impact to the business and at minimal risk. Prior to the implementation, finding time for scheduled maintenance proved difficult for the company.

John Olszewski, IT Infrastructure and Architecture Manager for Bunnings said, "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. 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."

"IBM, with the help of our business partner, Datacom, assisted Bunnings in working on their strategic plan to help Bunnings move to 24/7 processing by fast-tracking the POWER7 environment," said Garry D'Orazio, Client Executive, IBM Australia.  "We are delighted that Bunnings will continue to benefit from IBM's innovation in Power Systems with advanced virtualization capabilities, workload optimization and scalability, as well as processing horsepower to enable their growth strategy."

Bunnings also selected a second IBM XIV Storage System to support its secondary data centre storage environment and to enhance its business resilience architecture.

The implementation is expected to be fully completed in early 2011, and is the first major IBM Power 780 deal signed in Australia since the systems were announced in February this year.