Kingfisher has appointed storage industry company X-IO Technologies to stabilise and bolster the IT infrastructure underpinning the company's 1,060 stores.
The owner of B&Q, Screwfix, Castorama, Brico Depot and Koçtaş has 78,000 employees in nine countries serving six million customers every week. Managing the service at all of Kingfisher's stores requires an IT infrastructure run through two data centres in the UK.

Kingfisher's existing solutions were experiencing reliability issues and the day-to-day running of the business was being comprised by regular disk failures. The home improvement retailer needed to find a high performance, reliable solution that was capable of supporting its IT environment.

The company decided to move a portion of its mission critical data onto three X-IO ISE 210s. With a foundation based on reliability, performance and scalability, X-IO's Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) radically optimises price and operational efficiency.

Stuart Hartley, group storage architect, Kingfisher IT Services, explained: "In addition to being the only solution that could deliver the performance we needed, X-IO's unique 'Zero Touch' approach and five-year warranty also significantly reduced our storage costs. Compared to the other storage vendors it was a saving of 40% over the five years. This means we can continue to grow, safe in the knowledge that we are fully supported by a high performance storage solution."