Retail Solutions: Burlington Coat Factory Achieves Higher Quality Of Service And Scalability For Growth With Upgrade To Oracle Grid Computing Solution
Nationwide Retailer Realizes Greater IT Automation, Availability, and Flexibility with Grid Infrastructure
Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation has deployed an enterprise grid computing infrastructure utilizing Oracle® 10g software. The retailer's adoption of an Oracle grid computing solution has begun the enablement to deliver higher application service levels, improve Information Technology (IT) resource utilization, and allow for scalability of IT systems to support future growth.
Operating 375 stores in 42 states, Burlington Coat Factory is a national retailer offering clothing, footwear, and accessories for the entire family, a specialty baby product department, Baby Depot, and Luxury Linens, a home décor department. The company's IT systems are key to the company's business – tracking inventory stock levels, merchandise performance, product and service offerings, and sales records, among other details. Burlington Coat Factory has long relied on IT to help increase its business agility, improve performance and reduce costs.
In 2006, the retailer upgraded to an Oracle-based grid comprised of Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Clusterware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2. The grid consists of two 18-node Linux database clusters running on IBM xSeries servers.
Burlington Coat Factory's move to a grid infrastructure provides the company with a large pool of IT resources spanning hardware, software and storage to run a mixed workload of decision support and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications supporting its core business. In addition to supporting Burlington Coat Factory's critical Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) databases, each cluster dedicates several nodes to run standby as well as backup and recovery databases. The grid infrastructure provides the retailer with greater application service levels to help ensure that end users have immediate access to applications and information. Oracle Real Application Clusters enables the company to increase application availability by providing fault tolerance from hardware failures or planned outages. Burlington Coat Factory has added an extra layer of data protection by using Oracle Data Guard to replicate data from one data center to another data center – separated approximately 6 miles from one another – to provide service continuity in the event of a complete data center outage.
The retailer has enhanced its overall IT utilization by maximizing the use of its IT resources to power its grid computing infrastructure and reducing overall IT costs. With a large pool of IT resources to support its needs, Burlington Coat Factory is able to run its production systems and perform system backups concurrently saving it time and resources. The company has automated previously manual processes and reduced the complexity of managing and provisioning its grid by running Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to monitor, manage and maintain its environment. It has further simplified its IT environment by relying on Oracle Database 10g's Automatic Storage Management feature, a database volume manager and file system optimized for database access, to automate and streamline performance and storage management for their systems. The company replaced a third-party volume manager and file system and their associated costs using Oracle Automatic Storage Management.
Burlington Coat Factory's grid infrastructure allows it to handle current service levels and meet business demands over time. Oracle Real Application Clusters enables the retailer to add hardware servers incrementally as required, allowing their applications to adapt easily to growing business demands without disruption. In example, Burlington Coat Factory successfully increased the size of each its database clusters from 10 nodes to 18 nodes to accommodate new databases added to the grid.
"Grid computing is viable with Oracle 10g," said Michael Prince, CTO, Burlington Coat Factory. "Oracle 10g does away with the complexity related to deploying and managing a grid. Our grid is automated, redundant, and delivers a pool of IT resources large enough to deal with the spikes in demand that occur."
"Our grid infrastructure allows us to maximize the use of our hardware and software infrastructure which is key to our ability to support mixed workloads," said Brad Friedman, CIO, Burlington Coat Factory. "With a grid at our disposal, we can run transactional, decision support and administrative operations simultaneously while maintaining high levels of system availability and performance."
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