Primark embraces the cloud

Fashion retailer Primark has embarked on a new cloud strategy to ensure its continued agility

The company is growing and anticipates having 530 stores by 2026. Even with this growth, the company is on track to reduce its physical data centre footprint. Thus, Primark required a new, highly agile infrastructure and a cloud-first approach, or precisely, a cloud strategy that allows critical applications to be kept on a private cloud all while allowing the option to seamlessly move those applications to, or back from, the public cloud when appropriate.

The new infrastructure is built on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) technology and was designed and implemented by partner Triangle Technology Services, the 2023 VMware EMEA Customer Lifecycle Award Winner. 

Triangle leveraged VCF (and Advanced Services for VCF) to design and implement the migration of four data centres into two and create a third one on Azure VMware Solution, which provides a VCF environment in the Azure cloud.

“Our reliability has improved drastically since we modernised our data we modernised our data centres,” says Cian O'Leary, data centre operations lead, Primark. “With Primark’s aggressive opening of new stores, we’ve needed to leverage our software-defined data centre (SDDC) platform to scale quickly when needed. Although store planning can take up to three years, from an infrastructure point of view, we're ready to go at a flick of a switch.”