Shoppers Stop Ltd, promoted by K Raheja Corporation, has been among the pioneers of departmental chain stores in India. With 24 stores already in its kitty, Shoppers Stop has also forayed into new retailing formats such as speciality stores with outlets such as Crossword, Mothercare, Brio and Desi Café. Recently, it also entered the hypermarket segment with the launch of Hypercity. This rapid pace of growth and diversification demanded a flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. As the company grew rapidly, the IT team faced numerous challenges in terms of scaling up and implementing various applications across its different sets of businesses. Shoppers Stop's storage landscape, which earlier mainly comprised a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) system, proved to be a major bottleneck for the company in its growth phase.

Meeting the Demands of a Growing Business

As the company had aggressive plans for expansion, it became necessary for the IT team to quickly roll out new applications across various business units. However, the earlier DAS landscape was not easily scalable, which could have adversely affected the pace of growth. Anil Shankar, head – Technology Infrastructure Solutions, Shoppers Stop, said, "Earlier we had segregated islands of storage units, which implied that in some cases we had underutilised resources while in some others we were starving for resources".

A typical retail organisation requires a lot of applications and generates humongous amount of data with thousands of transactions taking place on a daily basis. At Shoppers Stop, as data grew rapidly, back-up and recovery processes became extremely time consuming in the DAS environment causing Shoppers Stop to restrict regular backup to key servers only. The company needed a centralised storage infrastructure that could be scaled on demand without disrupting the business. After scanning several available solutions in the market, Shoppers Stop decided to implement a unified storage solution from NetApp.

Managing Storage Infrastructure Through a Single Window

The NetApp solution helped Shoppers Stop to create a consolidated platform to run multiple business applications, such as Oracle Financial, Exchange and SQL. Describing the main components of the new solution, Gopakumar Panicker, senior manager – Infrastructure, Shopper' Stop said, "It includes two controllers, which mainly perform the functions of load balancing and processing. It is also equipped with a storage disk shelf, which stores the data". Additionally, the solution's software components like 'NetApp Snap Manager' enabled effective data management for the company. The Snapshot technology of the solution also enabled the organisation to have multiple back-ups of various applications in a single day, which ensured minimum loss of data.

Panicker added that as compared to earlier when the data was spread across multiple servers, today the organisation can easily manage its entire storage infrastructure through a single Web-based interface, as the new solution has enabled consolidation of data in a single storage medium.

Aligning Storage Infrastructure Changes with Other Applications

The rapid growth and expansion it underwent compelled the company to align the roll-out of other business applications with the transformation of the storage environment. Besides, they also had to ensure that this transformation had the minimum possible impact on regular business dealings. Keeping these factors in mind, the company decided to roll out the selected unified storage solution in the period from June to August 2006, which is generally a lean period for the retail sector.

Shankar mentioned, "In terms of implementation, there were many things, which we were doing for the first time and hence, we had to study the environment carefully before going in for the actual process". Citing an example, he mentioned the company's decision to run an Oracle Financial application on NFS with Linux, as recommended and used by Oracle itself. The transformation from Windows to Linux was accompanied with organisation-wide challenges. The whole transformation process required that the IT team go through a lot of training.

Major Advantages of Consolidated Storage

The process of consolidation and virtualisation of storage resources has resulted in a host of benefits for Shoppers Stop. According to Shankar, the biggest advantage has been the ability to roll out applications as per the demands of the business and that too with a very short turn-around time. The company can now easily increase its storage capacity to match the data growth in specific applications. Storage consolidation has ensured optimum utilisation of resources, while it has also made the scaling up process extremely flexible and cost effective.

Another major improvement has been experienced in relation to the back-up and recovery process. Shankar claimed that the company has experienced almost 50 percent reduction in back-up and recovery time. Weekly full back-up windows decreased from 28 hours to 14 hours and daily back-up windows decreased from 14 hours to 8 hours. This has improved manageability as well as availability of applications for the organisation. Other advantages include data protection and improvement in resiliency within the storage system.

Future Plans

In order to keep pace with ongoing expansion plans, Shoppers Stop is now planning to further strengthen its storage with several virtualisation and data protection technologies. The company has already taken initiatives on the storage and server virtualisation front and is using VMware on a large scale. "In the past one-and-a-half years, we have cut down the number of servers by at least 30 percent," informed Shankar. He also feels that this particular platform will support the organisation for at least another two years. Shoppers Stop is also exploring a native NetApp solution and various other tools to further enhance the resiliency of storage and to take data security and data protection to new levels.