[ Thanks to Michael
S. Mimoso for this link. ]
“Tractor Supply Co. of Nashville, Tenn., is the perfect example
of a company that needs scalable computing. With $1 billion in 2002
sales, it runs more than 450 stores in the U.S., opening 113 last
year. Until recently, however, its need for an easy-to-grow IT
system has gone unfulfilled. Rapid growth and large peaks in sales
mean that Tractor Supply Co. needs to scale out its processing
power at almost a moment’s notice, according to Stevan Townsend,
its manager of database and BASIS administration. In this
interview, he describes his search for a scaleable, redundant
replacement for a pay-as-you-grow WinTel system.“What problems did Tractor Supply Company (TSC) have
with IT system scalability?“Townsend: We were a Sun shop five years ago,
running Solaris. Those machines are very expensive to keep up, so
we moved our data warehouse to Intel in a Windows environment. We
started running Windows NT on Pentium Pro 4-way servers. We outgrew
that box quickly. We upgraded to a 4-way Xeon server. Eighteen
months later, we outgrew that. Then, we got eight-processor Intel
SMP servers running Oracle8i on Windows and Veritas Cluster Server
to handle the workload. This approach was not only costly, but also
resulted in unacceptable administration costs…”