Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

HP OUTFITS PERRY ELLIS WITH SERVERS, STORAGE AND SERVICES

HP has implemented solutions to build the foundation of an adaptive enterprise at Perry Ellis International, a leading licensor, designer and marketer of high-quality menswear with $1.5 billion in retail sales in 2002. Perry Ellis chose HP StorageWorks storage systems, industry-standard HP ProLiant servers and HP Services to keep operations and worldwide apparel distribution running around the clock.

To remain competitive in a rapidly consolidating industry, Perry Ellis is turning to HP's integrated approach for better management and control of their business and IT processes. Together, the new storage, servers and services will help drive cost and efficiency advantages and provide the agility to easily meet increasing business demands.

"Design innovation and company acquisitions are driving constant growth and evolution in our family of brands," said Ronen Lapidot, director of networks and telecommunications, Perry Ellis International. "Data demands grow along with our product lines. It's been a rule of thumb that we double the capacity of our back-end infrastructure every year. HP provides us with a cost-effective solution that gives us flexibility for future growth and helps us deliver 24x7 data availability to our product development teams around the world."

HP Helps Perry Ellis Prepare for Change

When its legacy infrastructure couldn't adapt to the increasing load, Perry Ellis brought in an HP StorageWorks Virtual Array 7410, HP ProLiant servers and HP mission-critical services. The result has been increased reliability, performance and business agility.

"As we've consolidated multiple database instances into our new environment, we've seen phenomenal performance increases," said Lapidot. "We've optimized our people, processes and systems to be more efficient and effective in supporting and responding to business needs."

Perry Ellis consolidated a suite of mission-critical applications onto an industry-standard server cluster. Two HP ProLiant DL580 G2 servers were implemented to deliver high availability, simplified systems management and increased performance. ProLiant servers are a central component of the HP Adaptive Enterprise vision, meeting the demands of today's adaptive solutions, including IT consolidation, business continuity and on-demand computing.

HP Services consultants assisted Perry Ellis with the design, implementation and configuration of the server cluster and a storage area network (SAN). This is a complex task that required expertise in planning and design, hardware configuration, network software installation, and verification of operability. Building its SAN around an HP StorageWorks Virtual Array 7410 and HP StorageWorks Auto Path VA for Windows, the company increased data availability and performance while lowering administrative costs. Perry Ellis also chose HP Critical Systems Support, which delivers both preventative and rapid reactive services to ensure 24x7 availability for the product development teams.

For its backup strategy, Perry Ellis selected a single HP StorageWorks Ultrium 2/20 tape library, which gives the company the ability to grow an additional 300 percent over current needs. The systems management staff uses HP StorageWorks Command View SDM software for storage management and HP StorageWorks Business Copy VA software to take snapshots of the databases.

Information about the complete family of HP StorageWorks storage solutions and HP's comprehensive network storage services offerings is available at www.hp.com/go/storage.