LC Waikiki Accelerates Market Growth With Hitachi All-Flash Solutions

Overview

Challenge

• Refresh aging infrastructure to support ambitious growth plans and a growing volume of data.

Solution

• Flexible, high-performance and reliable flash solution.

Outcome

• Simplifies IT estate.
• Reduces footprint and costs.
• Enables better and faster decision-making.
• Supports ambitious growth targets.

Challenge

From its headquarters in Turkey, LC Waikiki is a retail powerhouse for the entire region, and the largest fashion retail chain in the Middle East and Asian markets. Believing that everyone deserves to dress well, the company offers quality garments at affordable prices. Today, 43,200 employees operate more than 950 stores in 45 countries, and LC Waikiki aims to become one of the three most successful fashion retailers in Europe by 2023.

This requires sustained annual growth of between 25-30% and, to achieve this ambitious target, the company must satisfy customer demand. “The fashion retail market is very competitive,” says Ayşen Güney, Infrastructure and Support Director at LC Waikiki. “Success requires a very smooth logistics operation; the right product must reach the right store at the right time. Any delay will hurt customer loyalty, brand image and, ultimately, financials.”

Delivery, sales, customer buying patterns, stock quantities, customer feedback are all extremely valuable data. “The business of fashion and textile is a rapidly changing market, in parallel with the rapidly changing tastes of customers. It is important to develop new strategies to adapt to changes in the market and to ensure that data is stored and is easily accessed” adds LC Waikiki’s IT Storage and Database Manager, Gökhan Belindir.

The company assessed its IT estate as part of its growth strategy, and realized its mission-critical SQL database and proprietary application for product delivery planning were coming under increasing pressure. “As the number of our physical and online stores increases, the volume of data follows suit,” notes Güney. “This data is also critical to LC Waikiki administration to ensure better and faster decision-making, so it needs to be highly available and secure.” LC Waikiki needed to refresh its infrastructure to avoid delays in delivering merchandise from warehouses to stores. “To become one of the top three fashion brands in Europe, we need to underpin our operations with fast and highly responsive systems; we need infrastructure that can fulfill our high-performance demands,” adds Güney.

Solution

LC Waikiki invited three leading vendors to submit proposals for its infrastructure refresh. "We were impressed by the reliability, performance and high technology offered by Hitachi, notably the Hitachi-patented flash module drives (FMDs) that would enable us to compress our data without burdening performance," says Güney.

Hitachi Vantara provided installation and premium support services, including implementing the new architecture and migrating the data with 24/7 on-site support. "The great experience of the local Hitachi Vantara team ensured a smooth implementation," adds Güney.

Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G series and all-flash VSP F series are critical components of LC Waikiki's in-house solution that supports decision-making processes and times the delivery of garments to stores. The solution also includes Hitachi Advanced Servers , and Virtual Storage Platform G400 with Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) that provide powerful tools for file sharing, and a repository for in-house applications.

Hitachi Infrastructure Analytics Advisor (HIAA) provides comprehensive storage performance management and diagnostics to optimize business applications. Hitachi Data Instance Director (HDID), meanwhile, supports data management and data protection. The software allows LC Waikiki to simplify the creation of snapshots and disk clones.

Outcome

Thanks to Hitachi Vantara, LC Waikiki has consolidated and simplified its infrastructure, dramatically reducing database query times. Logistics are smoother and faster, helping to improve inventory control. “The new infrastructure has increased the speed of our logistics operation for delivering stock to stores,” says Güney. “We now have more time for decision-making, which allows us to deliver a greater variety of products.”

“After changing to the all-flash solution, we received feedback from employees in different business units that they were able to access data much faster” adds Abdurrahman Erol, IT Storage and Backup Specialist at LC Waikiki.

With better stock control, customers can now find anything they need on store shelves. LC Waikiki has seen a fall in the number of customers leaving stores empty-handed and is enjoying growth in customer loyalty – leading to improved revenue and profitability. Increased customer loyalty means that LC Waikiki can secure their existing market share against competitors. The FMDs’ data compression capabilities aren’t the only source of cost-efficiency. Hitachi all-flash and storage solutions have boosted performance. The storage virtualization simplifies operations and consolidates management while adaptive data reduction services minimize the storage footprint and energy consumption, which in turn reduces the cost of co-location, energy and cooling.

With the new Hitachi infrastructure now firmly in place, LC Waikiki can focus on achieving its ambitious growth targets. Güney concludes, “The Hitachi Vantara solution is flexible, high-performance, stable and reliable. It provides the support needed to help us accelerate growth and guarantee the nonstop, problem-free logistical operation that is key to success in the competitive fashion retail market. We have the confidence in Hitachi, so we can focus on the business and future goals.”