Sainsbury's examines loyalty data

05 November 97 Sainsbury's, one of the top three UK supermarkets, started using NUMA parallel processing systems from Data General to analyse data collected from its customer loyalty card programme. In a 3.7 Million pound deal, Data General supplied a 32-processor Aviion AV 2000 which it claims is the largest commercially available NUMA server in the world. Sainsbury's already has a 16-processor AV 2000 server. The benefit of implementing a data warehousing application on two servers is guaranteed availability, according to Martin Wright, Sainsbury's IT infrastructure manager.

In the last two years Sainsbury's has not been keeping up with its expected share of the groceries market. Its competitors such as Tesco appear to be stealing its thunder. One of the reasons was that a rumour went round that it implemented a pricing policy charging more for its goods at stores in affluent areas. This soon became folklore and customers voted with their cars driving to the nearest Tesco or other supermarket store belonging to the competition. Sainsbury's got the message, started a public relations campaign to squash this perception and introduced a loyalty card, about a year ago, in an attempt to woo its customers back and reverse this unwelcomed trend of falling market share.

Customer buying trends analysed using NUMA parallel systems
The two Data General AV 2000 Servers at Sainsbury's are to be used to run a warehousing application based on the ORACLE database with a Windows NT front end interface. The benefit of using two servers is guaranteed availability. Data can be downloaded from the larger server to the smaller system for testing new applications under development.

"We started with a bundle of data from the loyalty card programme, but soon realised we will need a significant amount of computing power to turn these data into an operational system capable of extracting meaningful information about customer buying trends", Mr. Wright quiped.

Sainsbury's system, will support around 300 users, and holds more than 1Terabytes of data at present. The expectation is that the data will grow to 3 Terabytes within a year, making it one of the largest warehouses in Europe. "Data General's NUMA system was very cost effective compared with conventional symmetric multiprocessing platforms", said Wright.

The Data General AV 2000 parallel server
The AV 2000 system is Data General's second generation NUMA server, which supports up to 32 Pentium Pro (200MHz) processors, 32GBytes of memory and 100 TeraBytes of storage on the Clariion subsystem. The AV 2000 can scale up to 128 processors in a cluster of four configuration, but Wright is not enamoured with loosely coupled clusters. "By using a NUMA architecture server we put off the dreaded day when we need to go to clustering with all its associated problems", he said.

Chris Lazou