HD Supply Implements Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation

Symantec Corp. announced that wholesale distribution company HD Supply implemented its Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability and Veritas Operations Manager software solutions to help it consolidate 22 data centers into three.

As a result, HD Supply realized more than $2 million in storage and disaster recovery costs, eliminated Severity 1 and 2 incidents, experienced a two-fold faster cluster server deployment, and reduced the time IT staffers must spend on cluster management.

HD Supply, sold to three private equity firms by The Home Depot in 2007 and headquartered in Atlanta, is one of the largest most diversified wholesale distributors in North America. With nine lines of businesses and a Canada operation and approximately one million SKUs, HD Supply provides one of the most expansive product portfolios and services to professional customers in the infrastructure & energy, maintenance, repair & improvement and specialty construction markets. The company has 680 locations and approximately 14,500 associates with more than 80 collective years of industry experience.

As part of an effort to make enterprise shared services stronger and leaner, HD Supply migrated its applications from HP-UX, IBM AIX, and Solaris proprietary servers to an Oracle Enterprise Linux platform hosted on 440 commodity HP ProLiant servers or VMware ESX servers. As a result, HD Supply saved $8 million; however, service levels became a challenge.

"We deployed traditional Linux-based clusters to maximize the availability of business-critical applications, but when internal network problems occurred, and a multi-node Linux cluster for a mission-critical Oracle database didn’t fail over as expected," said Brad Cowles, Senior Director, IT Platform Services, HD Supply. "Downtime of this type exposes HD Supply to potential revenue loss in the range of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars an hour, depending on the system. The cluster did nothing to protect us, and we had nowhere near the level of confidence we needed to start attacking the migration of the next wave of business-critical apps, most notably SAP. That’s when we turned to Symantec for help."

Working with Symantec Platinum Partner Agilysys, Inc., HD Supply implemented Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability from Symantec to manage all critical clusters for Linux. Veritas Storage Foundation HA combines Veritas Storage Foundation to simplify heterogeneous storage management, Veritas Cluster Server to monitor and automate failover for applications in case of failure, and Veritas Volume Replicator, an option to replicate data over IP networks as an alternative to traditional array-based data replication architectures.

Veritas Storage Foundation HA stabilized the Linux cluster environments. Ten major platforms, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), human resources and e-commerce systems, ran on UNIX and were suitable for migration to Linux. Now nine have been migrated and the tenth, a collection of major SAP modules, will be moved soon.

"With Veritas Storage Foundation HA, the IT team can roll out a business-critical clustered service twofold faster than with a traditional Linux cluster," said Cowles. "We’re delivering more than double the number of clustered back ends this year with no increase in headcount. Also, before we implemented Veritas Storage Foundation HA, one out of every three times we added or removed storage, we had a glitch somewhere on the cluster. We have zero now."

Saving Time and Money
Forty databases that support a plethora of applications now run as Oracle commodity clusters managed by Veritas Storage Foundation HA. Previously, those clusters generated a steady stream of storage-related trouble tickets. Veritas Cluster Server, eliminated those tickets, saving the IT team six to eight staff hours each month.

Before deploying Veritas Storage Foundation HA, HD Supply experienced two cluster-related Severity 1 incidents on a multi-million dollar per year ecommerce platform, exposing the company to revenue loss for each hour of downtime. Placing those databases on Veritas Cluster Server has eliminated Severity 1 or 2 incidents.

Disaster recovery capabilities are also in high demand, as HD Supply had gone from 22 applications with DR capability to 47 in just the past three years pushing the limit of available DR capacity. Deploying Veritas Storage Foundation HA has enabled IT to add an additional 20 apps into the disaster recovery stack with reliability and low recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.

Saving Millions of Dollars on Storage
The company has 26 storage systems totaling 800 terabytes, and another benefit of implementing Veritas Storage Foundation HA has been that when a storage array needs to be replaced, the company is not locked into working with one storage vendor to match pairs.

"We keep multiple storage vendors in play, and that saves us a million dollars a year," Cowles said. "Becoming array-agnostic is a big plus because it lowers the complexity of providing disaster recovery to applications that don’t need to run on a Tier 1 SAN. We have storage from HP, Hitachi, Pillar, NetApp, and EMC – and with Veritas Storage Foundation HA, I have a lot more flexibility in my choices."