“Overall we are delighted with the results of the migration to the new Logicalis Cloud platform. We have certainly noticed significant improvements in performance, and in the scope of analysis we are now able to carry out”

Abid Quyum, Database Manager, John Lewis

Partnership

John Lewis Partnership Customer Database migrates onto the Logicalis Cloud platform

The John Lewis Partnership is a visionary and successful way of doing business, boldly putting the happiness of Partners at the centre of everything it does. All 76,500 permanent employees are Partners who share the benefits of ownership of 35 John Lewis shops across the UK, 266 Waitrose supermarkets, an online and catalogue business, johnlewis.com, a production unit and a farm with a turnover of nearly £8.2 billion last year. Partners share in the benefits and profits of a business that puts them first.

The Challenge

For over 10 years Logicalis has provided a managed

service for the Partnership Customer Database (PCD). This

database provides a single view of all customers across the

Partnership including full point of sale transaction history

from both Waitrose and John Lewis stores.

The Oracle data warehouse hosting this data supports a

variety of applications used by the Partnership’s business

development team to drive marketing campaigns and

provide insight and analysis, affecting decisions as diverse

as in-store product placement and new store locations. The

Oracle database and the applications it supports are hosted

by Logicalis under the managed service.

Logicalis is also responsible for ongoing database

development and data acceptance and integration within the

Partnership, responding to the ever-changing demands of

the business development team and their internal customers.

With the renewal of the managed service contract the objective

of the team was to improve system performance and data

storage capacity, whilst simultaneously reducing the cost of

the service to the Partnership.

Case Study: John Lewis Partnership

The Solution

As a result, the managed service for the PCD was migrated

onto the Logicalis Cloud platform as a hosted service,

delivered from Logicalis’ High Density Data Centre.

By utilising the advanced technology underpinning the

Logicalis Cloud, including Cisco Unified Computing System

(UCS), NetApp storage, and software from CA Technologies,

a set of disparate software tools forming a single business

solution can share a common infrastructure, platform and SLA.

The Cloud platform includes Logicalis’ secure ‘Virtual

Container’ technology. The Virtual Container includes bare-

metal servers provisioned using Cisco UCS service profiles,

allowing the varied virtualised and traditional operating

systems to share the same platform and portability. This

includes test as well as production instances of the Oracle

database and all associated applications, running on Oracle

Enterprise Linux, with VMware virtualisation for Microsoft

Windows-based applications.

Being hypervisor and platform independent, the Logicalis

Cloud has the ability to support the mixture of native high

performance database platforms running directly on server

hardware, with virtualised servers on the same Cloud platform

offering the same high levels of resilience and security.

Migration of the PCD managed service from its previous

platform to the Cloud included an Oracle database upgrade,

migration of the operating system from AIX to Linux and

Windows, and the physical migration of the database itself.

In addition, Oracle’s Grid Control enterprise management

solution was deployed to give further insight into database

performance and facilitate ongoing administration.

Through a combination of careful planning, comprehensive

testing and extensive dry runs, the entire migration, although

complex, was achieved with no downtime to the customer

during business hours, and data currency was maintained at

expected levels throughout.

Key Benefits

As a result of the re-platforming and data migration, the

database performance (which is critical to the performance

of all of the supported applications) has improved on average

approximately threefold. Queries that previously were not

practical due to their complexity and the volume of data

processed now complete reliably and with acceptable

response times, dramatically improving the business

development team’s ability to derive insight and intelligence

from the wealth of data available.

The cloud platform underpinning this has not only increased

performance, but also dramatically increased service levels

allowing the virtualised and non-virtualised environment to

share a common platform, SLA, and resilience.

Logicalis UK Ltd

110 Buckingham Avenue, Slough, Berkshire, SL1 4PF

T: 01753 777200 F: 01753 777203

What can we do for your organisation? Visit: www.uk.logicalis.com