Tractor Supply gets out of WinTel's no-scale rut
| Tractor Supply Co. of Nashville, Tenn., is the perfect example of a company that needs scalable computing. With $1 billion in 2002 sales, it runs more than 450 stores in the U.S., opening 113 last year. Until recently, however, its need for an easy-to-grow IT system has gone unfulfilled. Rapid growth and large peaks in sales mean that Tractor Supply Co. needs to scale out its processing power at almost a moment's notice, according to Stevan Townsend, its manager of database and BASIS administration. In this interview, he describes his search for a scaleable, redundant replacement for a pay-as-you-grow WinTel system. |
What problems did Tractor Supply Company (TSC) have with IT system scalability?
Townsend: We were a Sun shop five years ago, running Solaris. Those machines are very expensive to keep up, so we moved our data warehouse to Intel in a Windows environment. We started running Windows NT on Pentium Pro 4-way servers. We outgrew that box quickly. We upgraded to a 4-way Xeon server. Eighteen months later, we outgrew that. Then, we got eight-processor Intel SMP servers running Oracle8i on Windows and Veritas Cluster Server to handle the workload. This approach was not only costly, but also resulted in unacceptable administration costs.
So, every 18 months, we had to throw out a server and get the latest and greatest. That's a lot of hassle just for scalability, not to mention that fact that we couldn't achieve sufficient failover with WinTel.
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