Stan James bets on Dell-EMC

Bookmaking chain Stan James has purchased EMC storage networking technology through Dell, to better serve customers in its shops, online and through call centres.

The company was already a Dell customer for much of its IT needs and the upgrade to its infrastructure, part of a £300,000 deal with the direct vendor, is another case of the now well-established Dell-EMC partnership working outside of EMC's traditional high-end market.

Stan James' head of IT, Richard Heade, told silicon.com: "The pre-sales consulting was excellent. We were given a lab at Dell's facility in Limerick, Ireland, to stress test our application with a variety of server and Dell-EMC [storage area network] configurations."

A Clariion CX500 system will carry and store data that relates to transactions, combining with Dell servers, an Oracle database - also licensed through Dell - and EMC storage management software.

Other technology also feeds into the system. For example, Stan James captures images of bets placed in its shops using a transaction processing and risk management platform from Finsoft.

Heade said that at the moment the amount of data being stored isn't increasing rapidly, though "the Clariion solution will scale to our needs".

The bookie has plans to introduce betting over interactive TV and mobile phones.