Home Improvements Retailer Kingfisher Opts for X-IO

X-IO Technologies (Xiotech Corporation) has been selected by Kingfisher plc, a home improvements retailer, to stabilise and bolster the IT infrastructure underpinning the company’s 1,060 stores.

The owner of B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, Brico Depot and KoçtaÅ has 78,000 employees in nine countries serving six million customers every week and annual sales of £10.6 billion. Underpinning the service at all of Kingfisher’s stores is a mission critical IT infrastructure, run through two data centres in the UK.

With over one petabyte of data under management and volumes continuing to grow, Kingfisher’s existing solutions were experiencing reliability issues and the day-to-day running of the business was being comprised by regular disk failures. The home improvement retailer needed to find a performance, reliable solution that was capable of supporting its IT environment.

After assessing the market, Kingfisher decided to move a portion of its mission critical data onto three X-IO ISE 210s. With a foundation based on reliability, performance and scalability, Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) optimises price and operational efficiency. Backed by years of development and research, ISE solves real-life storage problems and ensures BC of mission critical applications. X-IO’s storage technology delivers efficiency to customers using less equipment and at a lower cost.

Stuart Hartley, group storage architect, Kingfisher IT Services, explained: “In addition to being the only solution that could deliver the performance we needed, X-IO’s unique ‘Zero Touch’ approach and five-year warranty also reduced our storage costs. Compared to the other storage vendors it was a saving of 40% over the five years. This means we can continue to grow, safe in the knowledge that we are fully supported by a high performance storage solution.“

Earlier this year, after a second tender process, Kingfisher added two X-IO Hyper ISE 730 solutions, which use a combination of enterprise SSD and HDD to create a hybrid solution, to support the company’s VDI programme. Although the VDI programme is only in its infancy with 2,000 desktops installed, the hybrid storage solution has proved invaluable by boosting response times and service call productivity.

Gavin McLaughlin, solutions development director, concluded: “X-IO’s ISE technology is the perfect solution for Kingfisher. Not only does it enhance and support the mission critical IT infrastructure needed to run their business on a daily basis but it manages the data growth, reduces long term costs and simplifies the management of the infrastructure.“