AG Barr puts more steel in Irn-Bru with major data centre upgrade
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Soft drinks manufacturer AG Barr, famous for its Irn-Bru, Tizer and Orangina, is getting a major data centre upgrade of replacement servers, storage and services from Fujitsu Siemens Computers to drive its payroll and manufacturing applications.
The six-figure deal will cover new servers and storage to replace existing Fujitsu Siemens Computers hardware serving AG Barr’s four production sites at Cumbernauld, Mansfield, Forfar and Pitcox.
John McAlaney, head of IT for AG Barr, says that the upgrade will begin with two business-critical applications for payroll and ERP, which will be based on a clustered server environment supported by SPARC Enterprise Server technology. Two pairs of SES M4000 servers, each clustered using Veritas cluster server, will be attached to new FibreCAT CX3-20F storage arrays.
Backup will be provided by a FibreCAT TX48 LTO4 tape library, driven by Veritas NetBackup, running on one node of one cluster. All the new storage and servers will be attached to an existing SAN fabric.
Fujitsu Siemens Computers will also supply new Xprint V8.0 licences for AG Barr’s printer infrastructure and will continue to support technologies from different vendors.
Says McAlaney: “A distributed production environment within the UK and a dynamic logistics operation for outbound goods means we rely heavily on our IT infrastructure and systems to keep our business running 24/7. The upgrade will be essential in delivering reliability, increased efficiency and confidence to this critical part of our operation.”
