RetailT
echnology
that aligns with business needs.” And with Windows Server 2012, Paul Smith worked with risual to introduce global disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. The teams upgraded the hypervisors at Tier 2 sites to Windows Server 2012 and used Hyper-V Replica to replicate business-critical virtual machines back to its Tier 1 data centres. Hyper-V Replica is a feature of Windows Server 2012 that provides a storage and workload-agnostic system that replicates virtual machines over internet protocol (IP) networks. Now, with the Windows Server 2012
R2 OS and System Centre 2012 R2, Paul Smith can focus on improving IT service delivery to the business. The company will use the Orchestrator and Service Manager components of System Centre 2012 to introduce a self-service portal for IT services, such as provisioning servers. System Centre 2012 R2 will also be
used to automate manual tasks such as starting, stopping and monitoring systems using runbooks (which contain
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instructions for an automated task), and to streamline change management processes in the data centre. Also, Paul Smith is using StorSimple, a
Microsoft cloud-integrated storage system that works with Windows environments, to create a hybrid cloud storage solution that uses the Windows Azure environment. Paul Smith generates a lot of design data in its London office and it is using StorSimple to protect and copy that data to Windows Azure storage. The company is also using StorSimple to manage the amount of data that resides in its data centres. Paul Smith also takes advantage of
Microsoft cloud services for its business productivity platform. “Office 365 provides excellent flexibility and scalability across the entire global network, and gives us key Microsoft Office functionality on Windows 8.1 tablets in our stores,” added Bingham. “The combination of Office 365 and Windows-based mobile devices, which can be used on the shopfloor by the sales team in the customer environment, is a
very strong proposition. A mobile device in sales assistants’ hands helps customers bridge the physical and digital gap, driving better sales and shopping experience and improving upsell and cross sell opportunities.” Paul Smith embraced the Microsoft
cloud OS vision and built an agile, responsive global IT infrastructure. Along the way, it has used Windows Server, Hyper-V, and Microsoft System Centre hybrid cloud and data centre technologies to virtualise more than 80% of its servers, improve data centre density by 200%, and save more than £840,000 ($1.4 million) in IT costs in one year. It also reduced recovery time from 48 hours to 5 minutes for its mission-critical applications. Bingham concluded: “Looking back
over the past six years, there are so many examples of how we have used Microsoft technologies to our advantage. In fact, I don’t think there’s been any request from the business that we haven’t been able to accomplish.”
Spring/Summer 2014 49
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