Tesco has recently made an announcement revealing their new virtualisaiton platform based upon HP Blade Technology and Citrix XenServer. The architecture has seen the virtualisaiton of 1,500 servers which are capable of handling four times as many sales per second.
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® XenServer™ 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 percent, 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 datacenters by 20 percent.
“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,” said Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco. “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 utilization on the servers, versus the previous six percent.
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 penalized for using larger blade servers.
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 optimized for XenApp, providing customers with enhanced scalability and faster performance for Windows application delivery running in a virtualised environment.
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® XenServer™ 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 percent, 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 datacenters by 20 percent.
“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,” said Nick Folkes, IT director at Tesco. “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 utilization on the servers, versus the previous six percent.
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 penalized for using larger blade servers.
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 optimized for XenApp, providing customers with enhanced scalability and faster performance for Windows application delivery running in a virtualised environment.