Tesco Data Centre Consolidation ‘Nearing Completion’

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As the volume of data that businesses deal with increases in volume and becomes more and more complex, the data centre is emerging as a focal part of firms' IT strategies.

In the infancy of data management, many companies thought the best approach was to build many data centres and employ off-the-shelf data management kits that could be deployed in different regions.

But increasingly, less-is-more is coming into the fore and a new trend – data simplification via shared services – is leading the charge.

Data management is a particularly prescient issue for global firms, or companies embarking on international expansion.

Going global presents a number of data management issues for companies. Data stored in different parts of the world is, by definition, varied, local and bespoke, and can be stored in different languages or use special characters.

Given this dizzying variety of data, how can firms expect to effectively manage their operations, plan for the future and make informed decisions?

With great difficulty. That's why many are now streamlining and simplifying their data so they don't get swamped under a confusing data deluge.

A good example is Tesco. The retailer is nearing the completion of an ambitious three-year programme to deliver a single data centre operation supporting both its domestic and international operations.

Tesco has truly gone global – in just the last two years the chain has expanded its e-commerce business across eight countries – yet it plans to have all its data managed via one UK datacentre in six months' time.

Tomas Kadlec, Tesco's group infrastructure IT director, has spent the last year consolidating the group's European and Asian IT operations.

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Kadlec said: "We have consolidated the basic functions together."

Former Tesco CIO Philip Clarke, now its CEO, developed an IT policy that focused on pre-built data infrastructures – affectionately known as 'Tesco in a box' – that could be deployed at speed in new regions.

While an innovative idea, the strategy was not without its flaws.

Kadlec told Computer Weekly: "Even though [our] intention was to make it all the same it ended different [in each country] either due to time constraints or the teams worked differently or the requirements were different."

Now, Tesco's policy is to develop the IT systems wholesale, then deploy them, rather than take a piecemeal approach.

Kadlec wants to consolidate the 35 data centres Tesco has around the globe in a bid to run Tesco IT centrally out of the UK.

Tesco looks to be well ahead of the curve; New research by Gartner, the IT research house, suggests that business understanding of the data centre is set to radically change over the next five years.

The firm argues that the importance, role and functionality of data centres will evolve over the coming years, driven by a mix of technical, fiscal and service delivery concerns.

Gartner has recommended that organisations plan around eight focus areas to shape new data centre strategies. Among these, Gartner argues that as areas such as enterprise security, data management and mapping business processes to core IT become more and more important, the operational processes underpinning them will need to get more sophisticated.

Firms will need to invest in processes and tools so that their data centres remain agile, flexible and ship-shape.

Gartner says that over the next five years, most firms will notice a "significant increase" in hardware, including storage, server and network capacity, which will lead to increased network traffic, data centre floor space, power and cooling equipment.

"There will be a surge in demand for storage and backup systems and new roles, such as data engineers, will multiply," the firm said.

Some data centre facilities are crippled by ageing infrastructure, Gartner argues. As such, companies are urged to modernise their capabilities to they can meet the demands of new technologies and greater energy consumption.

"Over the next five-to-ten years most organisations will need to change their approach to previous data centre strategies used in the last five to seven years, as most of the world comes out of recession and social, mobile, cloud and information affect technology use," said Rakesh Kumar, research vice president at Gartner.

"Historically, data centers have been viewed solely as service delivery centers in which cost and risk must be balanced. Agility, a critical third variable, will become increasingly important in future."

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centre consolidation 'nearing completion'. November 29, 2013. Storetec.