Tesco, Iso-Britannian johtava supermarketketju, on ilmoittanut päivittäneensä toimintansa kannalta kriittisen RTS-järjestelmän (Real Time Sales) virtualisoimalla keskeiset sovellukset Citrix XenServer järjestelmällä ja HP:n ProLiant BL680c G5 -räkkipalvelimilla. Tesco on kasvattanut RTS-kapasiteettiaan peräti 75 prosentilla Citrixin ja HP:n tuotteiden avulla. Nyt järjestelmä kykenee käsittelemään 1500 myyntitapahtumaa sekunnissa, joka kattaa RTS-järjestelmien tarpeen ja jättää tilaa kasvulle.

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Tesco Cuts Datacentre Costs with Citrix XenServer and HP BladeSystem Servers

Citrix and HP infrastructure virtualises 1,500 servers to handle four times as many sales per second, boosting business efficiency

March 12, 2009 - Tesco (LSE: TSCO), Britain's leading supermarket chain, has announced pioneering updates to its mission-critical Real Time Sales (RTS) systems, virtualising key business applications with Citrix® XenServerT running on HP ProLiant BL680c G5 blade servers. With infrastructure from Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) and HP (NYSE:HPQ) in place, Tesco has increased its RTS capacity by 75 per cent, handling 1,500 sales-related messages per second - catering to the critical nature of the RTS systems and creating room for growth. This is a major milestone in Tesco's plans to virtualise its entire server infrastructure.

Tesco began investigating virtualisation as an alternative to adding more physical servers to handle its growing capacity demands as well as fulfilling its community commitment to reduce carbon emission levels. While adding physical servers would require an increase in power and cooling, virtualisation has better equipped Tesco to hit its target of reducing carbon emissions from its UK datacentres by 20 percent.

Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco, commented: "After conducting a major evaluation of virtualisation providers, we went with Citrix based on the strength of the Xen® technology, the ability XenServer has to provide high levels of performance for heavy duty 64-bit applications, its licensing model and its UK-based engineering team - decisions that have already paid off for us. The virtualised RTS environment uses less than half of the energy of the physical bare metal equivalents, which supports our CO2 targets and means we have already saved a significant amount on our electricity bills. We're running far more efficiently and the ongoing management of the environment is much simpler. While our primary goal in working with Citrix and HP was to create a more flexible IT infrastructure, the consolidation benefits are significant."

After the success of the initial project to virtualise RTS, Tesco has continued to deploy XenServer for its major server consolidation project. Citrix is working closely with Tesco to virtualise 1,500 physical servers on XenServer, including 80 Citrix XenApp servers. This is already bringing greater efficiencies to the way applications are delivered to each Tesco store. Tesco is aiming for a conservative 10:1 consolidation ratio for physical to virtual servers and is hitting 70 percent CPU utilisation on the servers, versus the previous 6 percent. From an operational perspective, Tesco has been able to utilise the XenMotion live migration feature of XenServer to migrate virtual machines to other physical hardware, with zero downtime, allowing patches and updates without disrupting users. Subsequently, Tesco has been able to remove its clustering back-up technologies and replace them with virtual servers. And, since XenMotion does not tie the resilience to a particular platform, Tesco has reduced its back-up server to live server ratio from 1:2 to 1:6.

XenServer is running on 64-bit HP ProLiant BL680C G5 blade servers with HP StorageWorks XP24000 SANs for enterprise-wide storage. HP's four-socket, four-core machines for blade servers were a clear differentiator for Tesco at the time of purchase. Resilience through the solution ensures there is no single point of failure, which is essential for a business-critical application like RTS. And because Citrix licenses for advanced virtualisation management capabilities are charged per server instead of per socket, Tesco is not penalised for using larger blade servers.

John Glendenning, vice president, OEM sales, at Citrix, commented: "RTS is a mission-critical system for Tesco with very high throughput of transactions based on Microsoft® IIS, BizTalk and SQL, so it requires the highest standards in processing power. Virtualisation is key to providing a cost-effective, efficient and future-proof datacentre, and XenServer has been key to helping Tesco achieve its ambitions for a virtualised environment that supports mission-critical systems. The Citrix Delivery Center approach has enabled Tesco to create a customised virtualisation strategy, using XenServer and HP for integrated server virtualisation and XenApp and XenServer for the most efficient delivery of applications to stores across the country. The strategy is helping Tesco achieve its operational objectives - ultimately, it helps Tesco provide a better service to its customers."

"Tesco can achieve immediate cost savings and long-term business growth goals by virtualising their key business applications with HP BladeSystem Servers running Citrix XenServer," said Jim Ganthier, vice president, Marketing, ESS Infrastructure Software and BladeSystem, HP. "The combination of HP BladeSystems and Citrix technology helps companies like Tesco strategically spend and carefully prioritize their technology investments - a critical task in the current economy."

The Citrix solution dynamically provisions both virtual and physical servers, resulting in increased IT responsiveness and agility by enabling capacity on-demand, and the ability to dynamically manage provisioning for disaster recovery and business continuity. In addition, XenServer is optimised for XenApp, providing customers with enhanced scalability and faster performance for Windows application delivery running in a virtualised environment.

Citrix and HP have been collaborating since March 2008 to help customers deploy and manage virtualised environments faster and more easily than ever before.