SOLUTION BRIEF

Intel®Xeon®Processor E7 Family

RetailData Center Efficiency

Faultless customer serviceCHALLENGES • Website performance. Npo Sistemi’s customer was running its server resources at 80percent CPU utilization, meaning that its commercial website struggled to cope with peaksin demand• Sluggish IT. DRAM was on average used at 80 percent, and saturated for short times daily.Peak requests grew 300 percent in some periods, making the Web portal slow and unresponsive• Completing orders. Due to slow processing speeds and lack of computing power, thecustomer was unable to complete all orders and maintain client service levels

SOLUTIONS • Powerful processors. Npo Sistemi upgraded its customer’s platform by adding three HPDL 980* servers powered by the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 family• Dynamic migration. Npo Sistemi reacted rapidly to improve the IT landscape, deployingits Intel® technology-powered solution in just four days

TECHNOLOGY RESULTS • Increased performance.With higher computing capacity, Npo Sistemi’s customer is able toprocess large amounts of information, running at much higher memory levels than before• Reliable servers. The upgraded platform delivers a more reliable service with increasedavailability, so it is able to cope with unforeseen data overloads and provide an increasein uptime • Better scalability. Using high-performance processors allows more data to be handledmore quickly. Front-end traffic increased beyond the 300 percent anticipated, ensuringcontinued business growth for Npo Sistemi’s customer

BUSINESS VALUE • Data integrity. Npo Sistemi can rest assured that all its data is handled securely• Business potential. The enhanced server platform means the organization can take onmore customers without compromising service quality, thereby capitalizing on its currentdouble-digit year-on-year growth• Customer service. The overall high computing performance and less downtime enablesboth Npo Sistemi and its clients to offer excellent customer service at all times

Npo Sistemi helps its customer to boost retail website performance with Intel®technology

“The Intel® Xeon® processor E7

family delivers performance that

is ideal for demanding, data-

intensive workloads such as those

encountered by our customers.

It is crucial that we can offer them

a high-capacity architecture

because that assures them of

high serviceability and as close to

100 percent uptime as possible.”

Andrea Parinetto,Business Development Manager

Hardware BU,Npo Sistemi S.p.A.

Keeping up with demand Npo Sistemi is an Italian IT company that wasset up in 1982 to deliver hardware and soft-ware technologies, IT solutions, and consul-tancy services. It advises on issues such asenterprise solutions, Web and business ap-plications and managed services for a broadrange of clients across both the public andprivate sectors. It provides a secure, high-performing platform that enables its customersto successfully manage critical processingapplications during peak loads, access morecomputing capacity, and, ultimately, takeon more business.To maintain its reputation as a trusted IT ad-visor and specialist, Npo Sistemi relies onhaving the latest technologies at its disposalso that it can offer appropriate top-end so-lutions to its customers. One of these cus-tomers, an online multi-brand fashion anddesign store, needed an infrastructure ableto manage extreme peaks of computing de-mand. Website performance and order man-agement are priorities in the e-commerce

industry, and the retailer required a high levelof computing horsepower to maintain a com-petitive online offering.When the only customer-facing portal is awebsite, it is crucial that it runs smoothly andkeeps up with demand so that sales can bemade and orders met. However, the retailerfaced very high demand on its site, especiallyin high season when sales campaigns werein full flow. The custom application which ranthe Web portal was developed with two tiers:a front end and a custom application runningon Apache* (Linux*) on the first tier, with adatabase on the second. The front-end ex-perienced the most pressure, as daily averagetraffic frequently peaked at 200 to 300 per-cent in busy periods such as Christmas.Handling all these online transactions wasplacing pressure on its server platform, andit was unable to keep up. On busy days, thewebsite occasionally faced issues because itwas at full capacity, running its servers at 75or 80 percent utilization. This utilization levelneeded to be much lower to ensure that the

Copyright © 2013 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved. Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Xeon and Xeon inside are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.This document and the information given are for the convenience of Intel’s customer base and are provided “AS IS” WITH NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NONINFRINGEMENT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. Receipt orpossession of this document does not grant any license to any of the intellectual property described, displayed, or contained herein. Intel® products are not intended for use inmedical, lifesaving, life-sustaining, critical control, or safety systems, or in nuclear facility applications. Intel does not control or audit the design or implementation of third party benchmark data or Web sites referenced in this document. Intel encourages all of its customers to visitthe referenced Web sites or others where similar performance benchmark data are reported and confirm whether the referenced benchmark data are accurate and reflect per-formance of systems available for purchase.Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and Mobile-Mark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations, and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. Youshould consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combinedwith other products. For more information go to http://www.intel.com/performance*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. 0613/JNW/RLC/XX/PDF 329231-001EN

business could keep up with demand peakswhile scaling up.In the lead-up to the Christmas rush, the sit-uation reached critical levels, with the web-site crashing frequently. Within a few days,the retailer expected it would be completelynon-functional and many sales would be lost.It knew that to cope with the increasing pop-ularity of the site while continuing to growits business, upgrading its infrastructure andprocessing power was a priority. So, it turnedto Npo Sistemi for help.

Boosting power to meet salesNpo Sistemi responded quickly, realizing theurgency of the situation and the importanceof upgrading its customer’s Web platform toa new infrastructure with high availability.It worked rapidly to understand the best wayto address both the immediate issue of meet-ing demand and the longer-term need forscalability. It was a difficult scenario becauseanything that threatened to crash the systemwould have hindered the retailer’s business.Little or no benefit could come from addingextra servers because the application didn’thave capacity to distribute and balance in-coming requests across the hosts, since thesystem was already saturated. A memory up-grade would have been detrimental to sales,necessitating costly downtime since the serverswould have had to have been switched offin sequence to replace the memory banks,thereby overloading the others that werealready at critical levels.Drawing on previous experience with cus-tomers that relied on intense data loads andpowerful processors, Npo Sistemi conductedtests on a range of solutions to find the bestoption for the retailer’s data-demanding work-loads. It needed to deliver increased memoryand I/O capacity to allow its customer toadapt to changes in short-term business de-mands and address requirements for longer-term business growth.

On the basis of advanced speed, capacity andreliability, Npo Sistemi recommended the IntelXeon processor E7 family as ideal to solvemission-critical IT challenges like managinglarge amounts of information and protectingdata integrity. The customer therefore boostedits computing resources by adding three HPDL 980 servers powered by the Intel Xeonprocessor E7 family, each with 128 GB of RAM.Upgrading to these more powerful, resilient,and steadfastly reliable servers allowed NpoSistemi to deliver much higher performanceand unfailing support for its customer’sbusiness-critical Web portal.Most importantly, Npo Sistemi conducted adynamic migration to avoid any downtime,turning the new front-end systems in over-lap with the old ones, and turning the oldservers off one by one to avoid impactingthe service. The customer did not lose salesbecause Npo Sistemi reacted quickly andworked under very strict time constraints toprovide a solution before the Web portal’savailability became critical. It chose, built andinstalled a platform, and then got the siteback online within four days so that the cus-tomer could maintain its own customerservice levels.

Optimizing IT efficiencyNpo Sistemi’s customer is very happy withthe solution and they found that the upgradedplatform significantly boosted its websitereliability. In fact, front-end traffic increasedbeyond the 300 percent anticipated, ensuringcontinued scalability for the retailer. Accordingto the customer, the new servers run at 30percent utilization on average and at 65 per-cent during peaks of demand, so they aremore than able to deal with the increaseddemand. There is also still a lot of headroomin terms of CPU processing power. Securitywas also enhanced, since it could accelerateencrypted transactions.Crucially, the customer was secure in theknowledge that Npo Sistemi’s Intel technol-ogy-based solution was agile enough to sup-port business growth and changes in demand.Increased demand impacted positively on sales,and the company is now seeing double-digityear-on-year revenue growth. It is seriouslyconsidering upgrading more of its data cen-ters with servers powered by Intel technology.

Lessons learned

After testing various server solutions,Npo Sistemi found that three HP DL 980servers powered by the Intel Xeon pro-cessor E7 family fitted its brief perfectly,enabling further innovation and businessgrowth. This new infrastructure beganto prove itself immediately, with CPUutilization at a much lower level than pre-viously. Now the customer knows it hasthe capacity to support peak loads andempower sustained business growth.

Npo Sistemi’s customer feels that a similarsolution to handle day-to-day businessprocesses would make the organizationeven more efficient.“The biggest improvement was processingspeed,” says Andrea Parinetto, business de-velopment manager for the Hardware Busi-ness Unit at Npo Sistemi S.p.A. “The differencewas undeniable from the very beginning; per-formance was fantastic and processing speedsincreased significantly. Prior to the new serverimplementation, the customer maintained75 to 80 percent CPU utilization during the1:00 to 5:00 p.m. peak processing time, butwith the new servers powered by Intel tech-nology, our measurements showed that theCPU maintained well below 20 percent uti-lization. After the initial production run, thecontinued strong performance of the newplatform has delivered capacity not only tomaintain high website performance andstrong uptime, but to expand the businessand increase profitability.”On the basis of this success, Npo Sistemihas demonstrated the benefits of the Intel®Xeon® processor-based platform, creating astrong example for other customers toreplicate.

Visit Intel's Technology Provider website at(www.inteltechnologyprovider.com)Find the solution that’s right for your organ-ization. Contact your Intel representative,visit Intel’s Business Success Stories for ITManagers (www.intel.co.uk/Itcasestudies)or explore the Intel.co.uk IT Center(www.intel.co.uk/itcenter).

Italian IT solution provider helps client increasecapacity and improve customer service with Intel®technology