Primark has announced the roll out of new cloud infrastructure as the retailer looks to expand its store network and reduce its physical data centre footprint.

Primark has implemented the new infrastructure, developed by tech partner Broadcom, to migrate four data centres into two and create a third, with applications able to move between each of them.

The move allows its critical applications, such as those powering its inventory management systems, to be kept on a private cloud with the option to move these applications back and forth from the public cloud when needed.

The cloud rollout forms part of Primark’s wider growth plans, with the company expecting a further 100 store openings by 2026.

Primark has already moved certain applications to the cloud environment, with over 50 virtual machines currently in the public cloud.

Additionally, Primark can project future workloads using real-time predictive analytics across its data centres, including cloud endpoints. It has also had access to automated capacity reporting since rolling out the new infrastructure.

“Our reliability has improved drastically since we modernised our data centres,” said 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.”

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