Fashion retail chain, Queenspark, turned to Lightedge to reduce downtime that had been costing the chain as much as R250 000 per day should a mission-critical server go down. The installation of the FTservers has now enabled Queenspark to completely overhaul its systems based on fault-tolerant architecture.
"We had been struggling with a significant amount of downtime and our infrastructure costs were escalating. As a result, we had to increase our staffing complement to maintain our networks," explains Gerald Radowsky, Head of IT at Queenspark. "It was clear we needed to upgrade, we really needed a stable architecture on which to build our new solution."
Given the volume of sales in any one day, Queenspark had to give priority to its point of sale system, which was previously running on Lotus Notes over an analogue line.
The new system saw the Notes being re-written in SQL, and the Web interface written in VB. All communications now run over a diginet line between the stores. Staff can now place live orders in real-time on the ACCPAC software running throughout the 40 stores.
Added to this, the more reliable architecture allowed Queenspark to install and run a voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) system, which Radowsky says lowered the company`s monthly telecommunications cost by over R100 000.
The implementation which was phased, and took a little over 10 months, saw no downtime and Queenspark remained live while two Stratus FT 3300 servers, two Stratus FT 5600 servers and one Stratus FT 4600 were installed.
Lightedge has been the preferred hardware supplier to Queenspark for the past four years. It was based on this relationship that Queenspark turned to Lightedge for advice and has resulted in a nationwide SLA agreement between the two companies.
"Given the situation facing Queenspark, Lightedge had to suggest the fault-tolerant route for their machines. We wanted to ensure that the mission-critical machines no longer required daily support and that they could run transparently on the company`s backbone. We also needed to reduce the amount of man-hours required to run and maintain the servers, when the resources could better be spent elsewhere," says Grant Poulton, Managing Director of Lightedge.
"Now that Lightedge is operating an SLA division we have been asked to maintain all current IT infrastructure as well as the additional new stores or offices being planned. The level of innovation at Queenspark bodes well for our ongoing partnership and we intend to continue lowering opex and increasing performance in the years to come," he concludes.
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