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 IBM mainframe makes it possible
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Overview
The Home Depot relies on the "non-stop architecture" of System z to simplify their infrastructure, support critical business applications and provide on demand business benefits to their stores. |
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Challenges
Home Depot is the second largest retailer in the United States. We have over 1800 stores spread across North America. We handle approximately 1.2 billion customer transactions a year, serviced by our 300,000 plus employees. Home Depot is the fastest growing retailer ever. We're trying to expand our business with at-home services, and also moving into the home depot supply. |
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| Home Depot's biggest challenges are keeping up with the growth [and] providing more modern systems to be able to do that. The benefits I was looking for in the System z platform were the low cost-of-unit transaction volumes. The System z is a very compact footprint, and also a staffing footprint. So we were able to aggregate those critical resources into the System z and we feel that we were able to drive down our unit cost of processing. |
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Business application integration
The System z servers are the total foundation of our IT computing environment. If you look at our foundation products, our database of choice is IBM's DB2. We also tie it together with other systems via MQSeries. And we also use a lot of WebSphere and WebSphere Portal. |
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Resiliency & availability
We decided to use the System z architecture because of the Parallel Sysplex features. It allows us to have a non-stop architecture, if you will, so that we can take a portion of it down, but there's always processing capability to support our production systems. |
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Infrastructure simplification
Having lots of large applications in a single environment is just inherently easier to manage. Adding to the environment quickly is very easy by turning up engines, adding a little more memory, things like that. |
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Systems management flexibility
We recently put up a very large SAP installation for our company and, being new to it we were a little unsure of the capacity demand. So IBM spun up several extra engines for us, just in case. It turned out, with their help and tuning the application, we didn't need them and we took them back offline and it happened transparently, which is always a good thing. |
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| And having that flexibility makes it a lot easier, we can concentrate on other parts of the project rather than having to absolutely nail the absolute capacity, and not impact our cost models. |
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Virtualization
When I look at the System z platform and I look at the new industry emerging term called virtualization, in my mind the System z has had that capability for many, many years. Now, with the extension into Linux areas, I can actually carve off Linux partitions and use the same hardware footprint. And with the Workload Manager now, I can actually move dynamically resources around: time of day, application load, [and] those types of issues. |
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Business integration deployment
The System z with our SAP implementation and the business warehouse, allows the store managers to actually access their P&L's online now. As their results are rolled up every day, the store manager can go in on a daily basis and see how they are responding to their sales goals each day. Before, they had to wait for the end of the month and actually had to make calls back here to financial analysts to do drill downs. They've got that drill down capability, literally on the fly now, in the store. We can do this without any incremental add to our IT head count because of our availability to the System z platform. |
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Future business deployment
The System z is the heart of the application fabric of our organization. It back ends critical applications such as WebSphere Commerce for our catalogue selling, the online shopping experience for Home Depot, as well as the DB2 database that houses all of the data for those critical applications. |
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| It's going to figure into everything we do, from our kiosks to our self-checkouts to our delivery services to our at home services. I don't see where it won't be our linchpin of our entire operation of the future. For The Home Depot, given our size, and our requirements, IBM System z is the only choice. |
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