In addition to selling electrical products directly via its own websites, Miller Brothers operates 'white label' sites on behalf of a number of very large business partners. Each site is dedicated solely to electrical goods, but fits seamlessly with the rest of the partner's website. These include Wal-Mart subsidiary Asda - one of the UK's largest supermarket chains - together with several other major retailers and leading brands.

"Whatever the partner's business, we're looking to provide a full package of services to support the operation of their site," explains Bill Laughlin, IT Director for Miller Brothers. "In addition to white label branding, this will typically include Service Level Agreements in relation to uptime; standards related to the presentation and look and feel of the content; and Business Intelligence reporting and analysis back to the partner - covering such key metrics as the numbers of visitors to the site, which pages are converting or not converting, average order values etc.

"To provide this level of service we essentially need to collect and store as much information as we can from our web servers - to help us understand what the customers' journeys are, and give the maximum benefit to our partners in terms of how their websites are operating and exactly what they're delivering."

Scalability supports rapid business growth
Initially, Miller Brothers hosted its own and its partners' white label websites via a network of commodity PCs, with PostgreSQL acting as the back-end database server. However, to support its growth and expansion, the company wanted a more powerful, competitively priced system capable of supporting much heavier traffic levels, and with the scalability to enable the system to be quickly and easily expanded as its business grows.

To fulfil its requirements, Miller Brothers initially approached one of its existing suppliers (a commodity server manufacturer) with a system specification that included the ability to handle a minimum of 20 pages per second for database access. As it lacked in-house expertise in PC clustering, the company was looking for a single system to which the PostgreSQL database could be transferred with the minimum of effort, and that would fit seamlessly within its existing infrastructure.

"We first got in touch with SGI when we were let down by our existing supplier, and were immediately impressed by their enthusiasm to help us," says Brian Jones, IT Manager at Miller Brothers. "They really bent over backwards for us. They wanted to get involved, and 'went the extra mile' to make sure our timescales and expectations were met - which we really didn't find from anyone else we spoke to.

"Our PostgreSQL database server drives all of the web servers we're using to serve content for our partners, and so we chose SGI® Altix® predominantly because it was quicker than the commodity server we were originally considering, and could easily provide the level of database performance we needed. It was also very expandable, meaning we could add more CPUs and memory as our business develops - and much more easily than we could with alternatives such as PC blades."

In March 2007, Miller Brothers ordered an SGI Altix 450 mid-range server with four dual-core 1.6GHz/8MB Intel® Itanium® 2 processors (eight cores in total), 24GB memory, two 146GB 15,000 RPM SAS disks and SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server 10. To meet the company's very tight timescales, the system was configured and shipped within 24 hours, and fully operational the very next day.

"The architecture of the Altix 450 is very similar to what we had before, which, with SGI's assistance, made it very easy to get the system up-and-running quickly," continues Brian Jones. "SGI's pre-sales support was excellent, and that's really continued since the system has been installed. When we've had any minor problems, SGI have done everything they can to sort them out for us as quickly as possible, meaning we've been able to provide a solid, reliable service for ourselves and for our partners.

"The system has been handling around 250,000 visitors per month, but we expect that to increase considerably as we get into the much busier trading period in the run-up to Christmas. And we certainly see the Altix as giving us the confidence that we can handle a major increase in load etc, as and when we need to."

Expanding service offerings for partners
"An unexpected benefit of the SGI Altix is that the additional power, resource and scalability provided by it is enabling us to bring in more partners, more quickly than we'd initially planned," concludes Bill Laughlin. "Because we have that extra processing power and scalability, when we're speaking to potential partners we can make reference to our current partners and the level of service we're able to offer in terms of the responsiveness and reliability of their sites, and we're gaining new business as a result of that.

"Looking to the future, we see our current partners as very much the starting point for extending our services. We're developing new applications in areas such as internet kiosks for shopping centres, airports etc; and we're also augmenting our existing PostgreSQL database server with further integration to the Oracle database management system as our business is expanding.

"The increasing uptake of internet purchasing really is creating a major shift in the retail market, and we expect a number of leading retail organisations to be interested in benefiting from the types of white label services that we're able to provide. We're going to continue to innovate, and we believe that while the majority of ASPs and ISPs tend to focus on price rather than performance, the reliability, ease of use and serviceability we're receiving from SGI will give us a significant competitive advantage. So the infrastructure we're operating now is going to serve us very well in the future - and across our new sales areas as we continue to develop them."

FURTHER INFORMATION
www.sgi.com/altix