Video: Frasers Group Modernizes SQL Server Workloads with Silk

And now for the details.

Frasers Group Overview

Frasers Group is an online and high street retailer in the UK. It started off in 1982 as a sports brand, Sports Direct, and has since grown to provide consumers with high end luxury, sports, and premium brands including Flannels, Game, USC, House of Frasers, and Evans Cycles.

Business Challenges

Being able to react quickly to market demands and operate at scale were very important goals for Frasers Group as they looked to expand further into Europe. To achieve these goals, the team looked to the cloud. Some of the biggest concerns they had were how to maintain costs for their Microsoft SQL Server licenses on the cloud and how to get the ultra-fast performance on the cloud that these workloads demand.

Introducing Silk

Frasers Group turned to Silk for help. The Silk Data Virtualization Platform makes it possible to achieve faster performance on the cloud compared to native cloud alone along with delivering consistent sub-millisecond latency. This makes it ideal for business-critical workloads like Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, Silk helps to rightsize compute VMs, eliminating the need to overprovision – and overpay – for unnecessary database licenses.

Results

With Silk, Frasers Group was able to achieve greater cost efficiencies on its SQL Server licensing as well as performance improvements and the ability to operate at scale. On top of that, with Silk’s partnership, the Frasers team is able to focus their attention on more high-value projects rather than maintaining the platforms that now run on Silk. According to Frasers Group CIO, Simon Palmer: “My experience working with the guys from Silk has been excellent. They can take our problems away from us entirely. Or in partnership, they can help us achieve some business outcomes that are challenging for us… It gives me, as CIO of Frasers Group, confidence that we’ve got a great team building our platforms for the future, as well as transforming our on-premises platforms into something which is easier to administer, better performing, and ultimately giving great customer experience to our end users.”

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