Cheap clothes giant Primark has shown there is still plenty of VMware business going round by signing a big cloud deal with Broadcom partner Triangle Technology Services.
Its new infrastructure is built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) technology, and was designed and implemented by Triangle, the 2023 VMware EMEA Customer Lifecycle Award Winner.
VMware owner Broadcom has been criticised for axing partner numbers and taking more big key customer business in-house, since its acquisition at the end of 2023, but Triangle's deal illustrates the partner opportunities that remain.
“Initially, we partnered with Primark on a large Oracle project, and over the subsequent years we have transformed its VMware footprint and SaaS estate from legacy environments to a fully-fledged VMware software-defined stack,” said Donal Byrne, CTO, Triangle Technology Services. “Primark now has an IT infrastructure that matches the speed and agility of the business.”
Triangle leveraged VCF (and Advanced Services for VCF) to design and implement the migration of four data centres into two, and create a third one on Azure VMware Solution, which provides a VCF environment in the Azure cloud.
With 430 stores in 18 countries, 75,000 employees, and a turnover of €10 billion, the company relies on and takes action based on daily business reports.
“Innovation is in how we manage our business,” said Stephen Byrne, head of global infrastructure, Primark. “And, as a business that innovates, we look for opportunities regarding automation, value, and speed. None of that can happen without the underlying IT services being in place to support it."
Primark is growing and anticipates having 530 stores by 2026. Even with this growth, the company is now on track to reduce its physical data centre footprint. Primark said it required a new, "highly agile" infrastructure and a cloud-first approach, or, precisely, a cloud strategy that allows critical applications to be kept on a private cloud, all while allowing the option to "seamlessly move" those applications to, or back from, the public cloud when appropriate.
Mission-critical applications can therefore be moved back and forth seamlessly between the two new private cloud data centres and the Azure VMware Solution public cloud environment. Primark has already moved certain applications to the Azure VMware Solution environment, and VMs can be rapidly added as usage scales up.
Over 50 virtual machines are in the public cloud, and the number is growing. Primark enjoys automated capacity reporting, and has experienced zero outages since deployment.
VMware Cloud Foundation Automation offers capacity reporting, enabling Primark to project future workloads using real-time predictive analytics across the data centres, including cloud endpoints. Moreover, the project was transitioned to Primark managed service practices, and Triangle manages the entire infrastructure according to strict SLAs for availability and stability.
Triangle has also transformed the entirety of Primark's licenses from perpetual to subscription. Portability of VCF subscriptions to and from Azure VMware Solution is now offered by Broadcom and Microsoft, providing Primark the agility to deploy on-premise or in the cloud as preferred.
Cian O'Leary, data centre operations lead, Primark, added: “With Primark’s aggressive opening of new stores, we’ve needed to leverage our software-defined data centre (SDDC) platform to scale quickly when needed. Although store planning can take up to three years, from an infrastructure point of view, we're ready to go at a flick of a switch.”
