Sears to Implement 95 Terabytes of EMC Storage

Retailer Sears, Roebuck and Co. plans to implement 95 new terabytes of EMC networked information storage, as well as open management software and global services, in a move to improve customer satisfaction and the performance of 2,500 stores nationwide.

“The retail business is tougher than ever, with aggressive competition in both price and assortment. Our challenge is to ensure that customers find the merchandise and service they want in our stores, while eliminating what they don’t want – faster than the competition,” said Jonathan Rand, Sears’ Director of Merchandise Planning and Reporting. “Our EMC infrastructure will allow us to tightly integrate information about customer buying trends with other data sources such as inventory and sales. This way, we can more easily correlate various data points and improve our decision-making about assortments, promotions, margins and inventory – in short, optimize productivity.”

Sears said it is working with EMC Global Services to implement an EMC storage area network (SAN) based on EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and EMC Connectrix fibre-channel switches that the company said will consolidate data residing on Sun Solaris/UNIX and Compaq servers running Windows NT. In addition, EMC ControlCenter, Symmetrix Optimizer and ESN Manager have been implemented, as well as EMC Data Manager (EDM) integrated hardware and software solutions to provide data backup and restore for a variety of business applications.

“The reliability, performance and flexibility of EMC networked information storage will make our information significantly more accessible, and as a result, more powerful,” Rand said. Sears’ EMC SAN will serve as a central repository for information spread across a number of different applications. EMC’s high-density disk technology and SAN software tools enable users to scale to virtually unlimited storage capacities and plug new applications into the EMC infrastructure.

Sears said it uses a total of 140 terabytes of EMC information storage systems and software to support assortment planning, merchandise planning, SAS business-intelligence projects, e-business initiatives, human resources and NCR Teradata data warehousing applications.