Quoting TMCNET
In an effort to save data center and personnel costs, cellular telephone provider T-Mobile Direct has employed IBM virtualization technology that will simplify the management of technology resources for its retail stores.
T-Mobile Directs intentions double the number of UK retail stores from 128 to 303 stores within one year, led the company to enhance the capacity and performance of core business systems as well as improve its IT management infrastructure.
T-Mobile Direct selected IBM and IBM Premier Business Partner, Triangle to develop a virtualization solution to help transform business operations, including transactional store data. With the management of virtual resources as well as partitioning of technology, T-Mobile will be able to automate business processes, improve application performance and reduce rack space by 25 percent.
According to a recent news release, IBM virtualization software will help manage more than 2,000 systems in the T-Mobile retail stores as well as one IBM System i 570 server running six virtual partitions. These virtualization technologies complement the current IBM point of sale solutions in each of the T-Mobile stores.
One of T-Mobile's infrastructure components is the IBM Enterprise Workload Manager (EWLM) that automatically supervises processor utilization on the IBM System, i 570, and redistributes workloads as required. EWLM is part of IBM's virtualization portfolio.
Simultaneously, T-Mobile has started deploying IBM Director, IBM Remote Management Agent and the Virtualization Engine Console for comprehensive management of point-of-sale solutions as well as servers. The IBM Virtualization Engine Console and IBM Director, running on the IBM System i 570 server, substitute the existing storage polling solution and offers complete management, monitoring and reporting across all 2,000 devices in the T-Mobile retail stores.
"IBM virtualization technologies have helped T-Mobile become more efficient," commented Paul Baucutt, Technical Support Manager, Retail Systems, T-Mobile Direct in a statement. "The solutions have allowed us to create a highly available, easily manageable infrastructure with a single point of control.”
"As one of the world's largest mobile operators with around 80 million customers worldwide, T-Mobile understands the value of leveraging enterprise-wide virtualization and management software to help simplify their entire infrastructure -- from each retail store to its datacenter," Rich Lechner, Vice President, Virtualization, IBM commented.
"IBM's industry leadership in retail solutions, combined with 40 years of innovation in virtualization and systems management, provides customers with a flexible and robust infrastructure to help them grow their business."
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