Littlewoods 2001 Consolidation Project
NUMA-Q to Solaris
"Sun brought together the perfect mix of products,processes and people to help
us migrate cost effectively from IBM®s NUMA-Q servers to the Solaris™ 8 Operating
Environment on Sun Enterprise™ 10000 servers. Our new infrastructure provides the
high availability, performance, flexibility and sustainability we need to move confidently
into the future."
David Hallett,
Group IT Director,
Littlewoods
Company
Industry/Market
Products/Services
- 2 Sun Enterprise™ 10000 servers
- Solaris™ 8 Operating Environment
- MC CONTROL-M and BMC PATROL
- Oracle8i database
- VERITAS Volume Manager
Key Business Solutions
- Sun consultants performed migration study, then devised and extensively tested migration procedure
- Sun Prince2 - certified project managers provided on-spec, on-time project completion
- SunSpectrum Gold SM service contract
upgraded for 24x7 support provides mission-critical problem resolution and escalation paths
Key Business Benefits
- Ability to accommodate significant annual growth in transaction volume
- £1 million (US$1.5 million) saved annually in operating costs
- Reduced system complexity, resulting in lower TCO
- Met aggressive 7 month time to market
- Currently sustaining substantially higher availability than previous Sequent system
As one of the United Kingdom's (U.K.)largest
private companies and a leading European
fashion retailer, Littlewoods sells more than
70,000 different items at its 120 High Street
stores and 130 "Index" catalog showrooms, as well as through its mail-order catalog
and e-commerce Web site. All told, the company generates annual revenues
exceeding £1.8 billion (US$2.6 billion).
The vast majority of the data generated by
the company is captured in its Customer
Accounts Management (CAM) database. More than 40 business-critical applications -
including order processing,customer
queries,customer statements, customer
relationship management (CRM) and data
mining - interface in some way with this
550GB Oracle8i database,which had been
running for the past four years on Sequent
NUMA-Q servers.
With virtually its entire enterprise dependent
on the CAM system, Littlewoods was understandably troubled that support for the
infrastructure upon which it ran was sorely
lacking. Nor would it improve:IBM, which
had acquired Sequent, announced that it
would discontinue support for NUMA-Q at the
end of 2001. "If we had an issue, and we did, it was incredibly difficult to sort out," recalls
David Hallett, Littlewoods™ Group IT director.
But, in 2000,even before learning of NUMA-Q's
demise, Littlewoods had become concerned
that its servers' existing processing power
would soon prove inadequate to handle both
the company's long-term growth and the
temporary, but crucial, traffic spikes during
peak periods, when telephone and Web
queries can increase five-fold.
A year earlier, Littlewoods™ NUMA--Q-based
platform had failed, leaving the CAM system
down for an entire eight-hour day and
preventing customers from entering catalog
orders into the database. The cost of
that day remained vivid to Hallett. "Sales fell
by £300,000, and not only were we losing
business, but we were also paying 2,500
call center operators to do nothing." Given Littlewoods™ increased reliance on
e-commerce, downtime in the future could
be even more disastrous since online
business is conducted around the clock.
All of these factors compelled the company to migrate its CAM system
to a server platform that could assure high availability, performance,
scalability and serviceability.
CAM Migration Builds on Past Success with Sun
There was never any question that Littlewoods would turn to Sun for
assistance with the CAM migration. In late 1998, when Hallett joined
Littlewoods, he found a multi-vendor computing environment that required
more skills and resources than the company could afford.
In keeping with an enterprise-wide trend at
Littlewoods towards operational consolidation and
integration, Hallett began gradually replacing the
company's multi-vendor mainframe and UNIX-
based computer systems with a single-platform
network comprised of four Sun Enterprise™ 10000
servers. "Our systems administrators, many of
whom were comfortable with the mainframe environment, appreciated the processing power, stability and reliability of the Sun Enterprise 10000
server," Hallett says. "At the same time, the
Solaris ™ Operating Environment was held in high
esteem by our database administrators."
"By migrating from disparate servers and
operating environments to a consolidated infrastructure based
on Sun Enterprise ™ 10000 servers and the Solaris ™ 8 Operating
Environment, Littlewoods has the room it needs to grow its business
in any direction it desires."
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But, ultimately, it was a business-driven decision:
"The main reason we chose Sun was because we
had plans to grow the business, and we wanted a
platform that would do just that," Hallett adds.
"We wanted to move onto larger processors and
were particularly attracted to the fact that the
Sun Enterprise 10000 server allows dynamic
domain sizing, which enables us to maximize the
efficiency of the machine by allocating virtual domains to each application. We also face
varying demands on processing power at
different times of the year, with the run up
to Christmas obviously the busiest, and the
Sun Enterprise 10000 server domains can be
reallocated as needed."
Although its in-house IS resources are considerable, Littlewoods engaged Sun Professional Services
in 1999 to assist with the migration of selected
applications to the Sun platform ™ wanting to
leverage Sun's expertise to help ensure a
successful implementation of the hardware
and operating environment. Then, in late 2000, the company decided to tackle the migration
of its central application environment - the
CAM system.
The CAM migration faced additional constraints:
it had to be completed by the end of a bank
holiday in May 2001 (it was determined that
failure to do so might jeopardize the operation of
the CAM system if it remained on the NUMA-Q
platform). Plus, containing the cost of the
migration was essential, since Littlewoods did
not have a formal budget for the project.
Higher Performance with Lower TCO
Working with the Littlewoods IS team, Sun
consultants helped analyze the migration
options, define the migration specifications, and
implement the entire migration project according
to the Prince2 project management methodology. Sun consultants also conducted a Sun
Performance Analysis and Capacity Planning
Service to assess system performance both before
and after the migration.
The migration included replacing two Sequent
servers with domains on two Sun Enterprise
10000 servers and porting all the CAM data to
the new servers. After exhaustive testing, the
migration was completed on time and under
budget, going live without a hitch on July 15, 2001. "Even with all the testing, I don't think any
of us dreamt the migration would go as smoothly
as it did," says Hallett.
Hallett is pleased that the consolidation onto the
Sun platform has reduced Littlewoods™ total cost
of ownership (TCO) for its server environment. For
the CAM system specifically,the company is
saving nearly £1 million (US$1.5million)annually
in operating costs. Uptime has increased substantially since the migration, and preliminary tests
have indicated that the Sun infrastructure will
process the forecasted peak transaction loads
without any difficulty.
"Sun brought together the perfect mix of
products, processes and people to help us
migrate cost effectively from IBM's NUMA-Q
servers to the Solaris 8 Operating Environment on
Sun Enterprise 10000 servers," Hallett notes. "Our
new infrastructure provides the high availability, performance, flexibility and sustainability
we need to move confidently into the future."
Step-by-Step Approach
Minimizes Risk
UK based Sun Professional Services consultants began the migration
project with a feasibility study to determine Littlewoods™ requirements
and how best to satisfy them. The requirements were included in a
Project Initiation Document, which set forth the scope of the project,
identified possible risks and established the rules governing its
design,implementation, timescale and quality metrics. "Sun Professional
Services brought not only its expertise in Sun servers and the Solaris
Operating Environment, but also a well-defined process for implementing
change," Hallett says. "The structure this imposed on a complex situation
made us feel immediately that, with Sun, we were in good hands."
As part of the project initiation,a project management organization was established and consisted
of the following teams comprised of both
Littlewoods and Sun staff as well as other vendors, when needed:Project Team, Technical Design
Authority, Project Board and Steering Committee.
Once Littlewoods signed off on the Project
Initiation Document, the team proceeded to the
second stage - the "migration playoff" - where it
evaluated several methods of moving data from the
NUMA-Q environment to the Solaris platform. In
the third stage - "migration implementation" -
the team built domains and clusters on the
Sun Enterprise 10000 servers, ported customized
C and COBOL code to the Solaris 8 Operating
Environment, wrote a load test generator, and
conducted multiple rounds of functional, performance and migration script testing over a period of
eight weeks to identify and resolve potential
pitfalls in the migration process.
The actual migration was planned for a period
during which Littlewoods expected the traffic
on the CAM system would be the lightest, minimizing both lost productivity and impact on
interfacing systems. Migration of production data
began at 9 p.m. Thursday evening and concluded
Saturday morning at 7 a.m. It was somewhat of
a marathon, according to Hallett, who points
to the dedication of Sun's consultants. "There
was no 9-to-5 attitude on the Sun team," he says.
"They did what it took to do the job - and
towards the end, that meant working around
the clock."
Littlewoods new CAM system went live with
32 processors in the production domain and 18
in the failover domain; 8 more processors were
added to the production domain to speed up
the migration and catch up on the delayed
processing of the Oracle database. After the
system had been in production for a short time, a
number of processors were removed for use
elsewhere. "Littlewoods makes the most of Sun
hardware by bringing boards in and out of various
domains, as required," Hallett explains. "The
flexibility of the Sun Enterprise 10000 servers
provides the easy system scalability that is vital
for Littlewoods™ growth."
Sun Support Keeps Infrastructure in Top Shape
In production for several months now, the
new CAM system is meeting or exceeding its
performance targets for queries,orders, statement runs and other key parameters. To
maintain this impressive track record,
Littlewoods relies on SunSpectrum Gold
SM
support
with uplifted 24x7 coverage to provide a variety
of mission-critical support services.
Increasingly, Littlewoods is using the Internet to maximize its benefits
from its SunSpectrum contract. Indeed, the company was one of the
first Sun customers in the UK to make use of the Online Support Center;
today, 70 percent to 80 percent of the company's support cases are
logged online.
"Sun Professional Services brought not only its expertise in Sun
servers and the Solaris ™ Operating Environment, but also a
well-defined process for implementing change. The structure this
imposed on a complex situation made us feel immediately that, with Sun, we were in good hands."
David Hallett,
Group IT Director,
Littlewoods |
Perhaps what Littlewoods appreciates most
about Sun support is its access to the VERITAS
Oracle Sun (VOS) Initiative, a three-way strategic
alliance that provides dedicated resources to
resolving complex interoperability issues,
including a Joint Escalation Center (JEC) that
works to shorten the time to resolution. "Even
companies like ours, that have consolidated
much of their IT environment must still contend with interoperability between servers, databases
and applications," Hallett points out. "The VOS
Initiative and JEC provides coverage for a key
operating risk here at Littlewoods."
More Room to Grow with Sun Fire 15K Servers
Although Littlewoods believes its investment in the Sun infrastructure
will help the company avoid another major migration for years to come,
Hallett is considering optimizing price-performance further by upgrading
his Sun Enterprise 10000 servers to Sun Fire ™ 15K servers.
"The math is simple," Hallett explains. "The Sun
Fire 15K server offers the same features as the
Sun Enterprise 10000 server with double the
performance. By utilizing all of our existing
applications and tools, and running them on the
same Solaris Operating Environment, we could
further reduce our TCO on the new system."
Optimized for a variety of workloads and applications, the Sun Fire 15K server could allow
Littlewoods to easily reallocate resources to
additional applications. Already, the company is
considering bringing its previously outsourced
Web site in-house and running it on the Sun Fire
15K server.
"Moving from a NUMA-Q environment to the
Sun Enterprise 10000 server has helped me to
sleep at night," Hallett says. "And now, with
opportunities the Sun Fire 15K server can give us
to grow our business, the days are looking much
brighter as well"
© 2001
Sun Microsystems,
Inc. All rights reserved.
Sun, Sun Microsystems,
the Sun Logo, Sun
Enterprise, Ultra,
Solaris, Sun Spectrum
Gold, and SunSpectrum
Silver are trademarks
or registered trademarks
of Sun Microsystems,
Inc. in the United
States and other
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