Data Placement Flexibility for Retail Analytics

This case study details the efforts of a leading British multinational retailer to achieve data placement flexibility to meet the needs of various information consumers. The retailer, with revenues exceeding £65 billion and over 330,000 employees, has been a customer of Cirata for over five years, initially using their technology for data replication between production and disaster recovery environments. The retailer's objectives include data segmentation for analytical workloads and retail demand forecasting. To address challenges related to data volume, they implemented IBM® Storage Ceph, a software-defined storage platform. The Cirata Data Migrator (CDM) facilitated the movement of data to this new environment, allowing for continuous updates and eliminating risks of data loss. The future roadmap includes a transition to an open data format to enhance analytics capabilities, with a focus on creating a finance data hub. Cirata is collaborating with the retailer to develop solutions that support their evolving data movement needs.