IBM Virtualization Technology Helps Leading Wireless Provider Double Customer Reach

IBM Virtualization Technology Helps Leading Wireless Provider Double Customer Reach

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that a leading cellular telephone provider, T-Mobile Direct, has implemented IBM virtualization technology to simplify the management of technology resources for its retail stores, helping save the company thousands of dollars per month in data center and personnel costs.

T-Mobile Direct, which oversees the growing retail network, telesales and online activities of T-Mobile, the UK network for Deutsche Telekom, was tasked with more than doubling the number of UK retail stores from 128 to 303 stores within one year. With the expected rise in sales volumes at its retail stores, T-Mobile Direct needed to increase the capacity and performance of core business systems, while simultaneously easing its IT management infrastructure.

To help address this challenge, T-Mobile Direct selected IBM and IBM Premier Business Partner Triangle to create a virtualization solution to help transform business operations, including transactional store data. Through the management of virtual resources as well as partitioning of technology, T-Mobile was able to automate business processes, boost application performance and reduce rack space by 25 percent. IBM virtualization software will help manage more than 2,000 systems in the T-Mobile retail stores as well as one IBM System i 570 server running six virtual partitions. These virtualization technologies complement the current IBM point of sale solutions in each of the T-Mobile stores.

One of T-Mobile’s infrastructure components is the IBM Enterprise Workload Manager (EWLM) which automatically monitors processor utilization on the IBM System i 570 and redistributes workloads as required. EWLM is part of IBM’s virtualization portfolio, and T-Mobile uses the product to optimize its daily processing of transactions to and from the stores. Even with the addition of new stores, the new technology will continue to help the company complete its daily data processing reporting in 30 minutes across its stores.

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