figleaves.com tries Red Hat for size

Online lingerie and nightwear retailer figleaves.com has turned to virtualisation and open source software to revamp the technology platform that will support its upcoming ecommerce site.

The decision to move to Red Hat Linux and VMWare technology on HP hardware was taken in May last year when the company chose to implement a new ecommerce suite from ATG.

Speaking to silicon.com, figleaves.com chief of technology Peter Pedersen said the retailer had outgrown the old system.

"As with anything that grows over time, the management of [the old platform] becomes cumbersome and time-consuming and needs a lot more work than something that's provided by a best of breed provider," he said.

During the summer, the company's IT team implemented the tech in its existing datacentre as well as at a second site that went live last summer, which was added to boost the company's disaster recovery capabilities.

"On that new hardware, we've subsequently been building and installing ATG software and we're now going into the last phase of testing the applications and software configurations that we've set up," Pedersen said.

The platform is yet to go live for the customer-facing website but the IT team plans on opening a beta version to selected customers in April.

Pedersen added that the project has seen the company commit much more to virtualisation, meaning it will be able to switch off around 100 of its 200 physical servers when the new platform goes live.

"In moving to a new platform for the whole website, we obviously wanted to take advantage of the latest technologies in virtualised server management and lower our footprint," he said.

As well as the reduction in carbon emissions, one of the main benefits of virtualisation has been that it's freed up members of the 24-strong tech team to work on other things and help shorten their day.

"Moving to the new server platform that we have with HP it'll be a lot easier to manage that as a virtualised environment… than maintaining lots of individual servers. It'll free up time and my guys will have to work less hours," Pedersen said.

He added that the company had been using virtualisation in small areas previously but following the recent work it's now looking at how it can apply the technology to its back office servers.

According to Pedersen, the biggest challenge of the project was adjusting to the Red Hat Linux server operating system and VMWare virtualisation software.

Previously the company used the Windows Server OS, meaning there has been a degree of acclimatisation to the new technology. "It's been an interesting period of change," he said.