With its existing business intelligence (BI) setup heaving under the growing data load, NTUC FairPrice was unable to move its systems to the next phase of BI analysis.
The Group CIO of Singaporean supermarket chain, Bernard Chew, was tasked with the challenge of embarking on a more detailed BI analysis of individual customer data, but was hampered by the backend systems' inability to handle the processing load.
Chew decided to embark on a hardware upgrade, which consisted of a set of HP and AMD dual core servers that ran the existing BI software.
Although the servers were under two years old, Chew told ZDNet Asia in an interview: "The servers were not very old, but even so they were struggling under the load."
As a result of the size of the data it had to mine, the old system would lag when processing data mining queries that were too large or complex and would not accommodate more than a certain number of simultaneous requests.
While the old system was already struggling with OLAP (online analytical processing) queries, Chew said the company was looking to move to deeper analysis, such as individual customer analysis.
Chew said the time was right for the hardware upgrade because the current data on the system--5 terabytes worth, accumulated over two years--is already expected to double "within the next year or so".
Furthermore, memory prices had dropped and the market was ripe with servers deploying quad-core processors, added Chew.
Eventually, NTUC FairPrice migrated its BI data to new Sun Fire X4450 servers running on Intel chipsets and StorageTek 2540 Disk Arrays at the end of December last year.
Chew said one of the considerations in choosing the line of servers was its "green" properties. Sun touts the servers' ability to perform at the same level as competing servers with similar specifications, while operating on two-thirds of the equivalent power and maintaining a smaller form factor.
"We were running out of space, so the smaller form factor with 2.5 inch drives helped a lot," said Chew.
Sun Singapore managing director, Ong Chee Beng, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia: "Space is a premium in Singapore, as well as power concerns to emerging markets," adding that the extra efficiency in the vendor's wares helps it compete with other vendors who make similar Wintel servers.
NTUC FairPrice's new system will support its 25 users, which Chew expects to grow to about 50 eventually. "I don't see more [hires] than that...you need special skill sets to do the data analysis," said Chew.
He is looking to embark on the next phase of upgrading the rest of the company's backend systems within the next three months. While the BI systems will be kept separate, the other services such as development and disaster recovery may share resources through virtualization, he said.
The business is increasingly bearing down on IT with demands, Chew said.
"Users are demanding a lot more value in IT projects and expecting shorter turnaround time...you have to find the right mix of people and vendors...internal resources are not fast enough, at times," he added.
NTUC FairPrice owns almost 180 stores in Singapore and has a staff strength of some 5,000, turning over sales of some S$1.42 billion (US$1.02 billion) in its last financial year.
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BI Software
Besides the hardware, wonder what BI software solution they are using.
Posted by anonymous on Friday, March 14 2008 01:13 PM