Sold on the new data center concept

Burlington Coat Factory CIO Mike Prince has ridden many a technology wave in his 21 years with the company. But none has inspired the awe he feels about the new data center. Automated provisioning, grid computing, high-speed system interconnection, open source systems, virtualization: "This approach is so rich and feature-full, it's overwhelming to think of how we're going to exploit it all," he says.

But exploit it, Burlington Coat Factory will.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Prince is piecing together the latest data center technologies to create a sophisticated on-demand architecture with extreme economy - processing power that previously would have cost $1 million will cost only $100,000, he says. To do so, Prince is picking technologies from industry stalwarts and start-ups alike.

"We didn't have to read the tea leaves to know the best technology out there for a new architecture," Prince says. Call it grid, as does Oracle, or on-demand, like IBM, he adds, "I absolutely believe in the basic concept of binding together slower systems by hardware and networking so they can be used in parallel to provide computing resources and in so doing creating a highly scalable and reliable environment."

Burlington Coat Factory is not just changing out the operating system, database and systems hardware used in the data center, it's undertaking this tri-level migration simultaneously. Under the new data center architecture, out goes the Dynix/ptx Unix variant and Oracle 8i database on IBM Sequent servers; in comes SuSE Linux (Novell) and Oracle 9i and 10g on Intel-based IBM xSeries machines. Topping off this infrastructure mix are new data center products such as Cloverleaf Communications' disk virtualization technology, PolyServe's file management systems for clusters, Topspin Communications' InfiniBand-based server switches with server virtualization software, and Vieo's application infrastructure management appliance.

These new data center plans mushroomed once Burlington Coat Factory learned in 2001 that IBM was closing down the Dynix/ptx line, and that Oracle was backing off support. First, the company quickly settled on SuSE Linux as its new operating system. But because Burlington Coat Factory could neither run Linux nor the latest Oracle databases on its old hardware, nor put its old database on the new platform, hardware and database change-out became equally imperative. The only sensible choices were IBM's Intel-based xSeries servers and Oracle databases running over Linux, Prince says.

Even with the other changes, the operating system decision was easy, given the company's familiarity with, and advocacy of, Linux. Burlington Coat Factory has used Linux for its point-of-sale and backroom retail operations since 1999. "We know it. We like it. We believe in it," Prince says of the open source code already deployed on about 7,000 POS systems and small computers.

Burlington Coat Factory began casually investigating Linux in the data center in 2002 and started a serious migration attempt in early 2003. But that effort lost full steam by August 2003, when developers realized "too many pieces of the stack weren't ready," Prince says. The IT staff said a Linux-based data center couldn't quite handle the company's high-season needs. At the time, SuSE Linux couldn't capably handle the company's disk access requirements. The operating system could perform hundreds of logical unit number (LUN) lookups, but Burlington Coat Factory needed to do thousands. Plus, the Cloverleaf disk virtualization technology wasn't ready to move out of beta-test mode, adds Prince, noting that the retailer made it through last year's holiday shopping madness with the help of loaned Sequent gear from IBM.