Wal-Mart Chooses IBM Storage Servers

IBM Corp. Monday scored a contract from the king of retailers when Wal-Mart chose Big Blue’s Enterprise Storage
Servers and eServer z900 mainframes as the backbone of its worldwide data center infrastructure.

The play is significant in that the data center will serve more than 4,000 Wal-Mart stores, Supercenters and SAM’s Club facilities and millions of customers around the world.

An IBM spokesperson who agreed to speak under condition of anonymity told InternetNews.com that Big Blue is replacing a combination of storage servers from EMC Corp. and Hitachi Data Systems. The spokesperson also said the z900 mainframes are bascially a refresh of IBM mainframes that Wal-Mart previously used to power its data center.

Wal-Mart is using the new Enterprise Storage Servers and the eServer z900 to create an
e-business infrastructure that will better handle the data processing, debit and credit transactions, as well as the product
replenishment for all of its retail outlets.

“This new IBM technology allows us to have a faster processing time, greater availability of our systems and better systems
operation without interruption,” said Dan Phillips, vice president, Technology Support and Operations, Wal-Mart. “The IBM Shark and
eServer z900 have given us a significant improvement in our processing time, in some cases allowing us to cut our processing time
for some jobs by more than half.”