Shoppers' Stop has announced the deployment of NetApp unified storage solutions to consolidate all of their Intel/AMD based applications. The storage solution would enable easy handling of back-up and recovery processes.

Importantly it would also create space for the data growth in the application that has outpaced the forecast. So even if the storage capacity of a particular silo has reached its maximum, it is easy to increase storage space allocations.

The retail company was using the DAS (Digital Attached Storage) landscape that consisted of DAS islands of applications. The proliferation of servers impacted the back-ups resulting in selection of a few servers for regular back up and other servers for the rest.

"Shoppers' Stop has charted out a business strategy for the next four years in 2006. We have ambitious plans for the future. Even currently the versatility of our operational areas commands typical applications and high data storage capacity. The NetApp unified storage system offers scalability coupled with fast backup and application availability,” said Arun Gupta, CIO, Shoppers' Stop.

One of the major benefits of the storage system has been reduction of the number of servers by half. It has enabled the company’s initiative for storage virtualisation facilitating faster application rollout cycles and quickly restore application servers.

“NetApp will be a major catalyst in enabling customers to capitalise on the next generation of data centre infrastructure, which will help them adapt to change, automate labour intensive IT management tasks to reduce costs and scale the infrastructure – non-disruptively – as the business needs evolve,” said Soumitra Agarwal, Marketing Director, NetApp India.