As fashion retailers compete across their bricks-and-mortar and online stores, it has become critical to establish an adaptive IT infrastructure. Point of Sale (POS) terminals must operate without fail, and real-time stock updates are critical to optimize inventory management. With 430 stores in 18 countries, 75,000 employees, and a turnover of EUR €10 billion, Primark understands the value that speed, agility and scalability bring. The company relies on and takes action based on daily business reports.
“Innovation is in how we manage our business,” says Stephen Byrne, head of global infrastructure, Primark. “And, as a business that innovates, we look for opportunities regarding automation, value, and speed. None of that can happen without the underlying IT services being in place to support it.”
Made-to-measure data centers
Primark is growing and anticipates having 530 stores by 2026. Even with this growth, the company is on track to reduce its physical data center footprint. Thus, Primark required a new, highly agile infrastructure and a cloud-first approach, or precisely, a cloud strategy that allows critical applications to be kept on a private cloud all while allowing the option to seamlessly move those applications to, or back from, the public cloud when appropriate.
The new infrastructure is built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) technology and was designed and implemented by partner Triangle Technology Services, the 2023 VMware EMEA Customer Lifecycle Award Winner.
“Initially, we partnered with Primark on a large Oracle project, and over the subsequent years, we have transformed its VMware footprint and SaaS estate from legacy environments to a fully-fledged VMware software-defined stack,” says Donal Byrne, CTO, Triangle Technology Services. “Primark now has an IT infrastructure that matches the speed of the business.”
Triangle leveraged VCF (and Advanced Services for VCF) to design and implement the migration of four data centers into two and create a third one on Azure VMware Solution, which provides a VCF environment in the Azure cloud.
Mission-critical applications can therefore be moved back and forth seamlessly between the two new private cloud data centers and the Azure VMware Solution public cloud environment. In fact, Primark has already moved certain applications to the Azure VMware Solution environment, and VMs can be rapidly added as usage scales up. Over 50 virtual machines are in the public cloud, and the number is growing. Primark enjoys automated capacity reporting and has experienced zero outages in the last six months.
In addition, Triangle has successfully migrated workloads to Azure VMware Solution. The migration maintains the standard security profile for all workloads, addressing one of the retailer’s essential risk requirements and audit points.
A secure environment that’s also cost-effective meets our needs in terms of how we manage it and the value it provides.
Stephen Byrne,
Head of Global Infrastructure, Primark.
VMware Cloud Foundation Automation offers capacity reporting, enabling Primark to project future workloads using real-time predictive analytics across the data centers, including cloud endpoints. Moreover, the project was transitioned to Primark managed service practices, and Triangle manages the entire infrastructure according to strict SLAs for availability and stability.
Scalability to avoid bursting at the seams
Triangle has transformed the entirety of Primark’s operations, including changing the license type from perpetual to subscription. Portability of VCF subscriptions to and from Azure VMware Solution is now offered by Broadcom and Microsoft, providing Primark the agility to deploy on-premises or in the cloud as preferred.
VMware Cloud Foundation provides the cornerstone for standardization and self-service, infrastructure stability, and superior performance and capacity with built-in scalability to the cloud.
“Our reliability has improved drastically since we modernized our data centers,” says Cian O'Leary, data center operations lead, Primark. “With Primark’s aggressive opening of new stores, we’ve needed to leverage our software-defined data center (SDDC) platform to scale quickly when needed. Although store planning can take up to three years, from an infrastructure point of view, we're ready to go at a flick of a switch.”
The company increased its retail store footprint by 5 percent, 22 stores, in 2024. There was a 100 percent improvement in stability and performance tickets during peak trading periods and zero store outages and incidents compared to weekly critical incidents seen previously.
The success of the platform built on VCF is evident in the evolving architecture supporting the company's growth without significant operational overhaul.
“The impact we’ve seen is incredibly positive,” says Byrne. “The business can't grow without us being able to provide these services, and we’re doing this seamlessly.”