Conforama chooses Bull NovaScale servers to host its datawarehouse applications
Paris,
June
17, 2003 -
Conforama has chosen theNovaScale™ servers, Bull's new range of servers to host its datamining applications. The 5080 and 4040 series selected by Conforama are Intel® Itanium® 2 based systems running Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 64 bits.
For several years, Conforama has been running a dedicated architecture for its datamining applications so as to precisely monitor their activity (marketing analysis ...)
Facing the tremendous importance played by these applications, Conforama has decided to increase both performance and quality of services delivered to customers consulting the company's databases.
This motivated the launch of the project beginning of 2003 to be operational in September 2003.
Bull was selected by Conforama for three main reasons :
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Costs
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Evolving technology fitting all of their requirements
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Availability lead-time.
The new infrastructure had to be extremely powerful so as to fulfil Conforama's requirements in terms of service continuity and also comply with the high volumes of transactions (several tera bytes). On the other hand, this infrastructure had to be particularly scalable so as to match expected increase in workload.
Why Bull NovaScale™ servers
« We had selected the Intel's Itanium® 2 technoloy and Microsoft tools to build our new infrastructure.. Bull NovaScale™ servers's scalability, performance and availability quickly convinced us. On all of these criteria they beat the competition.» said Jean Nicloux, Conforama's Chief Technology Officer.
When signing the contract, Bruno Pinna, Intel servers business unit Director declared: "This is a very important success that demonstrates the superiority of Bull NovaScaleTM servers in large datawarehouse projects, one of their privileged areas". This sales success shows the extreme interest of companies for flexibility, scalability and performance of our new NovaScaleTM servers ».
The solution developed for Conforama
The solution developed for Conforama consists of:
Hardware architecture consists of two Bull Bull NovaScale™ servers, Bull's new generation of FAME based (Flexible Architecture for Multiple Environment) servers, equipped with Intel® Itanium® 2 processors.
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A 2 way NovaScale 4040 server will be used as an OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) server .
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A 4 way NovaScale 5080 server, is to host the datawarehouse . By the end of 2003, this server will be upgraded to a partitionable 8 way to host the OLAP, environment, SQL server as well as development activities. The 64 bit architecture of these servers gives them a leading edge in the management of very large databases and are optimised to run extremely sophisticated analysis with high level performance.
These servers will adopt Intel's "Madison" processors upon availability.
The software architecture, as suggested by Microsoft will incorporate Windows® Server 2003, 64 bits SQL server 2000 database and OLAP services so as to fulfil Conforama's requirements in terms of both services continuity and evolving needs in volumes and increased workload. Data extracts will be made from production servers in the 173 French outlets while Multi dimension analysis will be carried out from OLAP cubes
Conforama Press Contacts:
Marie-Christine Lavaux : 01.60.95.25.62 - mclavaux@conforama.fr
Stéphanie Mathieu : 01.60.95.26.43 - smathieu@conforama.fr
About Bull
Bull designs and develops servers and software for an open environment,
integrating the most advanced technologies. It brings to its customers its
expertise and know-how to help them in the transformation of their
information systems and to optimize their IT infrastructure and their
applications.
Bull is particularly present in the public sector, banking, finance,
telecommunication and industry sectors. Capitalizing on its wide
experience, the Group has a thorough understanding of the business and
specific processes of these sectors, thus enabling it to efficiently
advise and to accompany its customers. Its distribution network spreads to
over 100 countries worldwide.
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