Ocado is a leading UK Internet grocer that was founded in 2002, based on a vision to change the way people shop for groceries, by offering the same benefits as a traditional store but adding the time-saving and convenience benefits of shopping online.

Business Problem:

Ocado’s rapid growth and reliance upon the latest IT infrastructure for peak efficiency led to it outgrowing many of its original hardware platforms. As a result, Ocado is embracing virtualization as a strategy, although its mix of hardware platforms included proprietary RISC-based platforms as well as x86 servers. This meant that traditional server virtualization technologies, which are constrained to a single hardware architecture, did not provide a complete solution.

Solution:

The IT team at Ocado deployed QuickTransit for Solaris™/SPARC®-to-Linux®/x86-64 in its application development and test labs, allowing legacy applications to be run on the latest hardware platforms, prior to new versions of those applications being deployed on the new server infrastructure. The initial application migrations were achieved seamlessly, without any changes required to source code or binaries.

Results:

• Porting projects can be implemented independent of hardware changes
• Server consolidation benefits resulted in decreased energy use
• New infrastructure occupies one quarter of the previous amount of server rack space
• Minimal impact on productivity of IT team and end users