Business issues
Sear Canada’s 30 percent annual data growth began to tax its infrastructure. The batch processing of customer transactions, for example, periodically exceeded windows. This had the undesired effect of preventing some credit card sales during morning hours until the processing was completed. Moreover, the data growth caused a proliferation of racks devoted to storage arrays, tapes and other devices. Data center floor space dwindled and costs associated with shipping large numbers of tape cartridges to an offsite vault took an upturn.

Solutions
The Sears Canada IT group selected StorageTek’s FlexLine™ Shared Virtual Array® (SVA™) disk system (V960) with 236 gigabytes of capacity to optimize the use of its system-managed storage (SMS) pool (via IBM’s Data Facility Hierarchical Storage Manager DFHSM). It is using the SVA to dynamically allocate storage to end-user projects as required, versus the previous standard of guessing. About 275 disk volumes (780 gigabytes) were migrated from direct-attached storage disk (DASD) to the SVA. The company also deployed StorageTek’s Virtual Storage Manager® (VSM®) system back-ended by five T9840 tape drives. This allowed the IT team to implement storage data and media consolidation projects. The VSM system also is being used to write application data from the target marketing group and customer transaction process groups among others. After seven days, data volumes are stacked and written to tape for onsite backup.

Business benefits
Cut batch processing time by 45 percent to 80 percent to eliminate lost revenues resulting from morning overruns. Slashed cartridge media consumption by 75 percent to save $200,000 annually. Cut CPU cycle minutes by 30 percent per year.