Travis Perkins builds its tech future

Travis Perkins has carried out a complete overhaul of its IT over the past year and as a result has a much more robust infrastructure with capacity to expand.

The project was prompted by the acquisition of DIY retailer, Wickes. Clive Carter, IT Infrastructure manager of Travis Perkins, told silicon.com: "We bought Wickes in February 2005 and we needed to look at bringing the two data centres together."

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But the builders' merchant soon realised it would be hugely beneficial to roll this project into a more major tech overhaul.

"We were getting to the point where the computer room was filling up and things like our UPS, our generator, our air conditioning were all requiring some fairly serious maintenance as well," Carter said.

The company also needed to make its disaster recovery system more reliable and up-to-date.

Carter explained: "With the traditional disaster recovery service you've got three problems: firstly it's becoming too expensive, secondly you've got no guarantees of its availability. And the third thing is it takes a certain amount of time to build that kit and recover everything."

To solve these issues, Travis Perkins worked with IT services company Logicalis to refresh its technology infrastructure on an HP platform.

Logicalis built and tested two data centres at its base during the summer of 2007 before the kit was transferred to Travis Perkins' base in Northampton in August.

Carter said the 14,000-strong workforce experienced no impact on their service during this time. "I have to say that particular part of the project went extremely well," he said.

He added: "I think the challenge was just the scope of what we were trying to achieve."

The Wickes system was transferred onto the new infrastructure at the beginning of 2008.

By setting up a mirrored data centre for disaster recovery, the company reduced the time to recover systems and applications in the event of an outage.

Where previously it took 36 hours to complete a failover and recover core servers, this now stands at a guaranteed four hours.

Carter said: "The biggest benefits initially are that we have a significantly more robust solution from an infrastructure point of view."

He added: "We can afford for things to break here without having to take the service out and go to the other data centre. So we've still adopted a more traditional approach to building this data centre."

The company plans to switch between servers as a regular business procedure in order to check the systems and ensure the IT team is fully prepared for any business critical outage.