InformationWeek

September 8, 1997

Dealing With The Data Flow

Retailer ShopKo turned to EMC's Symmetrix for robust and efficient storage devices

an Olp estimates the amount of information in his company's data warehouses will reach 1.5 terabytes this week-and will grow to double that size in six to eight months.

For Olp, director of technology for $2.5 billion ShopKo Stores Inc. of Green Bay, Wis., the rapid growth poses challenges in ensuring fast, reliable access to that data. ShopKo is also under constant pressure to move huge amounts of data quickly from production databases into each warehouse, without tying up production systems or clogging the network. The competitive business environment means that "we're all under tighter schedules than ever," Olp says. "It's changed the face of IS."

ShopKo turned to Symmetrix data storage devices from EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, Mass., to deal with those problems. Symmetrix's systems store the retailer's data warehouses as well as production data from ShopKo's mainframe DB2 and AS/400 databases, both from IBM, and legacy flat files. Software supplied by EMC-Symmetrix MultiHost Transfer Facility for the flat files, Data Reach for the DB2 data-moves data from production systems into warehouses based on Oracle running on an IBM RS/6000 SP parallel processing server.

Without software like EMC's, users are "forced to use mainframe cycles and network cycles to move the data," says Doug Fierro, manager of marketing programs for EMC. "With Symmetrix, the data is moved faster and the mainframe can do more important functions more efficiently."

One analyst agrees that the EMC software solves a common problem with data warehouses. "Customers don't have the infrastructure to move 200 Gbytes of data," says Carl Greiner , VP of enterprise data center strategies at Meta Group, an IT advisory firm in Stamford, Conn. "They'd need real expensive network bandwidth to do it, and it would still take them half a day."

Olp says ShopKo uses Symmetrix even for its development systems because of its speed and reliability. "It's hard to tell a development manager he's late because of a hard-disk failure," he says.

ShopKo's three corporate data warehouses have grown to a total of 1.5 terabytes in just eight months. The first and largest contains information about retail sales and movement of products at the company's 135 specialty discount stores. A second warehouse handles prescription benefit management information for the ProVantage health-care division of ShopKo. The third is a medical management database called ProVMed, which stores information on medical claims and pharmaceutical claims for managed-care organizations.

The importance of the data was one reason for choosing EMC, Olp says. "We wanted high performance an d reliability," he adds. "Decision makers need that information just as much as online transaction processing is available for the daily running of the business."

Back to News in Review