Success Story: Data Centres

I. CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT / PROJECT CONTEXT

Customer profile:

Australian success story JB HI-FI is one of Australasia's fastest growing and largest home entertainment retailers. Since its humble beginnings in 1974, the company is now listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, employs 5,300 staff and generates $2.3 billion in annual revenue.

Over the past 10 years, JB HI-FI has experienced significant growth, increasing its number of stores from 12 to 125 across Australia and New Zealand.

Customer objective and constraints:

Underpinning its operations, is JB HI-FI's Melbourne-based data centre. The data centre provides mission-critical applications and data to all of the company's stores, including Point of Sale (POS), communication, finance, inventory management.

To support the increasing IT requirements of the growing company, JB HI-FI's IT team added server and rack equipment to the data centre in an ad-hoc fashion.

JB HI-FI's data centre was comprised of disparate servers and racks and power and cooling solutions not designed for data centres that addressed their requirements today but not tomorrow.

"We had five racks we had pieced together over time. Each rack had a different design, different power, cooling and backup requirements and different support. Each rack had an individual UPS," said Geoff Craig, Group IT Manager, JB HI-FI.

"If there was a blackout, we had 10 minutes backup time to do a graceful shutdown, however this could only be done if we were there when the blackout took place."
Two standard room air conditioners were used to cool the room and a small portable air conditioner was used as back up.

According to Craig, the cooling system could no longer cope with the IT equipment's cooling requirements and the building that housed the data centre couldn't support more infrastructure.

"Over the summer months we had major cooling problems. The server room reached a temperature in excess of 30 degrees on occasion. The equipment survived but power consumption in the room skyrocketed because the server fans were running at such high speeds."

With the company forecasting annual growth of 10 per cent, JB HI-FI required a new data centre that could meet its current and future computing requirements.

 

"We are now a $2.35 billion company. We needed disaster recovery and an assurance of services that befits a company of our size and stature."

"When Head office decided to relocate from Brighton to [the Melbourne CBD suburb of] Chadstone, we seized the opportunity to build the data centre of our dreams," said Craig.

II. SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION

Implementation methodology (main phases):

JB HI-FI's IT team got the go ahead to commence planning the design, implementation and rollout of the company's new data centre.

"We had three months to coordinate the design, conception, quotes and delivery of the new data centre. Because we were working to a very tight timeline, we needed a data centre solution that could be rapidly deployed," said Craig.

"We also required direction from data centre experts to ensure that we not only met the deadline, but also achieved optimal efficiency in the data centre."
JB HI-FI's IT team reviewed power and cooling solutions from other vendors, but according to Craig, nothing compared to APC's offering.

"We had seen many other solutions but we had a long-standing relationship with APC and knew the quality of APC's equipment and support," said Craig.
In February 2009, JB HI-FI began working with APC Professional Services to assess its requirements and design its new data centre.

"We engaged APC Professional Services to assess our capacity, power and cooling requirements and advise the best room design and equipment to suit our specific needs," said Craig.

Solution overview (services, products, systems, architectures...):

JB HI-FI deployed APC's InfraStruXure solution, an on-demand architecture for network-critical physical infrastructure (NCPI). It consists of pre-assembled components including modular and scalable UPS, power distribution units, metered power rails, rack enclosures and cooling units, as well as environmental monitoring.


The InfraStruXure design allows the selection of standardised components to create a solution through modular configurations. This standardisation enables an easily scalable architecture designed to meet changing needs and future expansion.

"Our new data centre consists of APC's InfraStruXure with modular 32kW UPS, six new APC racks and three APC InRow Cooling units - two live and one for back up," said Craig.
"We also deployed APC's ISX Central management system with environmental monitoring, a Vesda fire detection solution and an FM-200 fire suppression system."

 

The new data centre design has enabled JB HI-FI to increase its computer power from 10kW to over 30kW and at the same time reduce the number of servers by virtualising.

"We can now do more with less and have the capabilities to support our current and future high density computing requirements.

 

III. RESULTS / ACHIEVEMENT

Customer benefits:

"JB HI-FI is growing rapidly - we plan to open another 20 stores in the next year. The modularity of the InfraStruXure solution means we can easily add equipment to the data centre without impacting the efficiency of the data centre design. This is an important feature for a growing company like JB HI-FI," said Craig.


"We can now auto expand our data centre to support store growth at a moment's notice without impacting the availability of our systems."

According to Craig, the centralised management of racks, power, cabling and cooling means the IT team spends less time managing and monitoring equipment separately. There are also less points of failure, meaning that less time is spent resolving faults.

APC's InfraStruXure solution enabled JB HI-FI to increase its power back-up time and availability in the event of a power failure, supporting increased resilience of the data centre and allowing significant expansion to occur.
JB HI-FI's data centre now has 55 minutes of power back-up instead of 10 minutes.

"Increasing our power redundancy by selecting the modular APC Symmetra PX32 with N+1 redundancy UPS model, as well as our cooling redundancy, has provided me with great peace of mind," said Craig.

InfraStruXure also enables JB HI FI's IT team to manage the data centre environment remotely. The system proactively alerts the IT team to any anomalies via SMS or email on their handheld devices. It allows the team to resolve issues before users even realise there is a problem.

Customer testimonies (Verbatim):

"As JB HI-FI continues to grow, we not only have a flexible design that will accommodate new hardware, but we are spending less on IT management and are able to achieve maximum availability of our critical applications and data."