How Billabong ‘surfer giant’ makes use of IT

With Christmas around the corner we thought it may be interesting to find out how a company in the retail industry would benefit from technology.  Heston Paules one of our solution consultants discusses how technology can benefit a company such as Billabong South Africa.

The problem:

Billabong South Africa was faced with an IT platform that was not resilient enough to meet its business requirements. The server hardware didn’t have the redundancy required to cope with component failure and was not of adequate specification.

In the event of a disaster, the recovery period would have been lengthy.  This would have led to unnecessary business downtime and potential loss of revenue. The business services reliant on the IT infrastructure did not have a sufficient disaster recovery plan or the ability to provide continuity in the event of hardware failure or software corruption.

The solution:

Together with Space Age Technologies, the internal IT department at Billabong constructed a business services catalogue. This provided insight to categorise the dependencies of business on the IT platform. With the resultant catalogue, Space Age was able to design a technology platform that would support the recovery time and point objectives of Billabong. The solution is a dual data centre, both with virtualised servers and a storage area network, which provides a full level 3 (complete site failure) disaster recovery capability. The deployment provides Billabong with mirrored data and server infrastructure to allow for business continuity and data protection.

Basic diagrammatic representation of the solution:

 Benefit to the company:

A high performance efficient IT platform that is also resilient enough to handle unforeseen issues and failures. The efficiency is achieved by pooling storage in a SAN, the performance on the other hand is achieve by leveraging the host hardware for virtual servers as well as the enhanced performance of the SAN technology improving throughput.