From the outset of this project, Pro-Duo’s main goal was to improve performance and reduce management costs. Around 200 Pro-Duo stores, plus offices and warehouses across Europe, are largely dependent on the IT architecture at the Ghent headquarters. Consequently when this environment became outdated, Pro-Duo went looking for a replacement that could offer better performance. A fast system is essential for developers to test new innovations, for example, or for finance and marketing employees who regularly generate reports to gain insight into business performance. When looking at all the options available on the market, the retailer chose a purpose-built solution from Proact which could deliver better data reduction without impacting upon performance. The new environment is fully redundant, meaning that in case of a failure, business operations are not impacted and can carry on as usual. In addition, the system is up to five times faster than before, greatly reducing the time it takes to generate reports.
Initially 20 days were planned to migrate to the platform, but thanks to implementation services from experienced data centre and cloud provider Proact, the solution was ready to use within ten days. Now, Pro-Duo benefits from near-perfect availability with non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance periods.
Tom Debruyckere, Senior Server Infrastructure Engineer at Pro-Duo, says: “Proact immediately offered us an implementation plan which covered all the steps that had to be taken – this was highly convenient for us. The appointed Proact project manager made sure everything was steered in the right direction. There was zero downtime, which meant the business never even noticed the switch. Although management of the environment has become a lot easier, we can always rely on Proact’s proactive 24x7 support if we need it.”
“We were very pleased to hear Pro-Duo wished to extend its partnership with us. We look forward to further supporting Pro-Duo as the firm looks to centralize the IT environment step-by-step.” says Sander Dekker, Business Unit Director Europe West at Proact.
