Symphony gets infrastructure composed by IBM et al

£100 million turnover fitted kitchen, bedroom and bathroom furniture manufacturer Symphony Group says its seen massive improvements in information delivery performance as well as support for web-based growth since implementing a new IBM pServer-based IT infrastructure. IBM and partner DCS e-Integration implemented a tailor-made business solution essentially enabling Symphony to achieve its e-commerce objectives. Ruth Rew, IT manager, says: “Speed of transactions is absolutely key to our business. This new system has improved the delivery of information more than 10-fold. It has also increased our Internet site and e-commerce capabilities.” The solution for Symphony, which serves more than 20 major customers and 1,000 employees, encompasses business management, data storage and communications. It was built on a pSeries p690 Unix enterprise server which provides 24x7 number crunching and, with its logical partitioning, covers separate production, test and development environments. It also has a 1.2Tb IBM Enterprise Storage Server and LTO tape Drive as well as IBM xSeries Intel servers and IBM’s Tivoli suite for system management.