Johannesburg, 31 Jan 2007
Business Connexion is putting its recently launched R143 million data centre to good use with key clients looking to gain the benefits of hosting their data and equipment in a world-class facility.
The company has recently concluded the migration of Edgars Consolidated Stores' (Edcon) data centre environment from the JSE building in Sandton to a new Midrand facility, in a delicate project that was completed within 67 hours.
Edcon is the leading clothing, footwear and textiles retailing group in SA. The first Edgars store opened in 1929 and, since then, the company has grown to include 10 retail brands, trading from over 900 stores across Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, SA and Swaziland.
According to Michelle Hall, retail sector industry executive at Business Connexion, Edcon's data centre environment was previously hosted by Business Connexion in the JSE Securities Exchange building.
The set-up included a high availability configuration, with redundancy and automated failover between two separate centres within the same building.
"While these data centres have performed very well over the seven years we have hosted its infrastructure, Edcon sought to take advantage of the more advanced facility in Midrand, which was officially opened in June," she explains.
Business Connexion's Midrand data centre significantly increases its capacity to serve existing and new clients in support of the company's strategy to expand its already dominant position in the managed services market.
The facility has been designed and built to the world's most stringent standards, and is rated as a tier four centre, the highest level on The Uptime Institute's rating scale. (The Uptime Institute is a global body focused on improving uptime management in data centre facilities.)
As a tier four data centre, Business Connexion's facility features redundant systems for power and cooling, with multiple distribution paths that are active and fault tolerant. Controlled access, gaseous fire suppression systems, water-cooled computer rack systems, and fibre connectivity infrastructure with a redundant backbone connecting two separate buildings, are only some of the centre's features.
"The main objective in the execution of this project was to ensure that Edcon infrastructure and all facilities were successfully relocated to the new data centre with minimal business interruption. As a retailer, Edcon's stores are open every day of the week and are highly dependent on their technology infrastructure for effective operation," says Hall.
Given this constraint, the relocation was preceded by three months of intensive planning.
The relocation of Edcon's test and development environment commenced on Friday 14 July and was successfully completed the following evening. The relocation of the company's production systems commenced one week later on Friday 21 July and had to be complete by Monday morning at 7am.
Incredibly, says Hall, during the entire move, all of Edcon's stores and systems had to be fully operational with the exception of Sunday evening at 9pm when the IBM zSeries mainframe was powered down.
"A variety of activities had to be managed in order to ensure that it was 'business as usual' despite the fact that the business systems which power Edcon's in-store processes were in limbo," says Hall.
This involved detailed planning, including making complete backups of all applications, databases and configurations prior to their relocation, ensuring that all batch runs were successfully completed and that all systems were up-to-date, prior to zero-hour, Monday 7am.
There was also the logistical question of physically moving a large number of sensitive physical devices.
Given the complexity of the project - Edcon's production systems include a wide variety of platforms such as Unix, Mainframe and Windows/Intel, with applications covering retail, HR management, BI, financials and planning - Hall says project management was at the heart of the successful project.
"The simple concept of 'plan the work, then work the plan' was the answer to this highly complex project. The planning identified pre-work that could be completed well in advance of the switchover, allowing the full focus of the project team to fall on the physical migration phase," says Hall.
In excess of 150 people were involved in the relocation project, with 10 truckloads of equipment, valued at some R90 million, making the journey from Sandton to Midrand.
Hall says the project plan for the weekend exceeded 3 600 lines of activities. The relocation of the physical production systems commenced at 10am on Friday 21 July 2006 with the creation of full backups of all systems, and was successfully completed at 4:45am on Monday 24 July, with the handover of Edcon's production systems to the data centre services operations team.
Staggeringly, the project reached its conclusion two hours and 15 minutes ahead of schedule.
With the move having been made without a hitch, Edcon is today benefiting from one of the world's most advanced commercial data centres.
Henk van der Watt, Edcon service delivery executive manager, and Henri Slabbert, Edcon CIO, acknowledge the successful completion of a project which met their expected high standards for transparency and no impact on the company's business.
"The complexity and time-critical interdependencies throughout the entire weekend's activities cannot be over-emphasised. Without the total commitment and passion displayed by each and every person involved in this project from the outset, starting with the planning, walkthroughs, re-planning and then leading up to the last two weekends, this relocation would not have been possible," says van der Watt.
Demonstrating its ability to successfully organise demanding and highly complex migrations to the new data centre, Business Connexion has reaffirmed the value it has consistently delivered to Edcon since first signing a managed services contract with the retailer in 1999.
Project data:
The project scope included the relocation of the following equipment from the Sandton to Midrand facility:
Windows platforms
* 168 devices comprising mostly IBM X-series and Compaq legacy equipment, and including Citrix blades.
Unix platform
* 2 x IBM P590 (Unix)
* One IBM P590 was pre-installed in the Midrand data centre in order to mitigate risk of having to relocate two during the same time period.
Mainframe production partition
* Edcon production partition activated on pre-installed new IBM Z990-306 processor.
* Edcon test and development partitions activated on same pre-installed IBM Z990-306 one week earlier
Disk/tape subsystems
* 2 x HDS 9980 disk subsystems for Unix and Wintel
* 2 x IBM 3584 Robotic Tape Library devices
* 1 x USP disk subsystem for Mainframe data
* 2 x EMC Symmetrix disk subsystem for Windows data
* 3 x EMC Centera disk subsystems for the Edcon voice recording system
Network
* 2 x 6500 Cisco core switches relocated
* 2 x 7500 Cisco routers with CIPs relocated
* Business Connexion Communications radio link used on Saturday 22 July for data transfers between the Mainframe (Sandton) and Open Systems (Midrand) while the mainframe systems were still operational in Sandton
* Some 50 Telkom lines transferred from Sandton to Midrand
* 5 x ATM circuits transferred from Sandton to Midrand
Security
* Variety of routers, switches, fire walls and FTP servers including mail marshals and anti-virus servers
Cabling
* 800 x fly lead cables, approximately 3.6 km in length
* 600 fibre units, approximately 2.6 km in length
Logistics
* 10 x truckloads of equipment transported between the Sandton and the Midrand data centres, starting Friday and finishing late Sunday night with a 100% accuracy of destination delivery
* 262 physical items relocated including equipment, spares, pre-packed cages and peripherals
* Value of equipment relocated in excess of R90 million
* Some equipment weighing up to 3 000kg per unit
* 750 meals consumed
Staff
Some data centre operations and technical staff relocated to the Midrand data centre to operate and support the Edcon systems. Members of the data centre staff are now manning five data centres: Sandton 1 & 2, Midrand 1 & 2 and Crown Mines.
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