Bangalore: Fabindia, an Indian chain store retailing handmade products by craftspeople across rural India, to cope the transactional demands has adopted a unified storage solution that would not only connect all their retail outlets but also speed up real-time transactions on their central database. 

"To speed up T/O we decided to adopt SSD’s in our storage servers but quickly faced the difficulty of delivering the high I/O SSD throughput to the main servers as the overall throughput is limited by the throughput of the interconnect being used,” said Mr.Raja Ghosh,Head – IT Systems,Fab India. “We realized we needed a storage solution that could not only ramp up transaction speeds but could also be scaled up to meet our future network, application and storage needs,” he added.

Fab India turned to Tyrone Systems, a provider of innovative storage and computing solutions for enterprise data centre and high performance computing environments for a quick solution.

Tyrone Systems offered a unified storage solution built around its Opslag FS2 unified storage architecture that supports variety of protocols and interconnect options essential for high I/O application environments. The Tyrone Opslag FS2 system implemented by Fab India consists of 8 Blade Servers running on MS Windows Server and a MS SQL database server, 72 bays with InfiniBand ports, 64 bays with SSDs configured on RAID 5 used for online transactions and SAS drives used for volume backups.  

“Using our Opslag FS2 unified storage platform we were able to virtualize Fab India’s file and block data and drive high I/O per sec on retail transactions cost efficiently, “ said Sandeep Lodha, Marketing Director, Tyrone Systems, “Now retail transactions running on Fab India’s database servers are fast and each store irrespective of their location across India is lodging sales data automatically and in real-time rather than on a day-end basis as before,” he added.

Having unified its storage infrastructure and improved interconnect cost efficiently, Fab India now empowers store owners, when out of stock for a particular item, to check in real-time the inventory resupply status or even know which other Fab India outlet is having stock of that particular item.

Read Also: 6 Sailfish Features That Android And iOS Lack and 10 Innovations Expected To Be Accomplished By 2013