Co-op Group consolidates architecture with Azure Stack HCI to save £400,000 a year on power

And that approach has paid off. Co-op has grown to become one of the largest food sellers in the United Kingdom, with more than 2,500 locations. It’s also one of the United Kingdom’s leading funeral services providers, a major player in the general insurance industry, and a budding legal services provider. However, years of growth left the company with a highly complex and heterogenous digital infrastructure that proved difficult to manage. To continue delivering value to customers and communities, Co-op decided to simplify its IT infrastructure and gain greater management and control with the Microsoft Cloud and Azure Stack HCI.

A patchwork in progress

Years of organic growth, mergers, acquisitions, and various application developments had left Co-op with a variegated digital architecture spread across two datacenters. The resulting technology sprawl led to visibility and management challenges for which Co-op had to retain skill sets across numerous platforms, databases, and operating systems, with a need for comprehensive management. “We’ve got a varied infrastructure footprint, which made a cloud migration challenging because we’ve got applications tied to specific operating systems or database platforms that hadn’t ever been certified to run on a public cloud platform,” recalls Scott Robertson, Principal Enterprise Architect for Foundation Technology at Co-op Group.

Although the company had a general cloud-first strategy, it needed to maintain on-premises infrastructure because some of its older applications weren’t cloud certified, and other key applications had latency requirements. Taking a reasoned and hybrid migration approach, the company began its cloud journey by overseeing a supply chain transformation effort for SAP in its retail business, which it decided to run on Azure. By using Azure to run its SAP workloads, Co-op was able to take infrastructure off the critical path for delivery and realize a truly impressive deployment time. “Azure infrastructure saved us close to nine months in delivery time for our new SAP implementation compared with a traditional datacenter-hosted infrastructure,” says Robertson. Also, because SAP was brand new, Co-op was better able to quickly and easily respond to all the new and increased infrastructure requirements that came with it. “The dynamic nature of Azure infrastructure was well suited to the unknown sizing and performance requirements of our new SAP platform,” adds Robertson. 

The SAP on Azure implementation exposed the company to Microsoft’s deep expertise through its product development and engineering teams, which worked onsite to help resolve some pressing infrastructure challenges. With that momentum, Co-op pursued a hybrid infrastructure approach to harmonize its on-premises and cloud support models, and Azure Stack HCI was a key part of the plan. Co-op began by engaging a client architect from SCC to help work through the infrastructure options. This led to working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and choosing HP as the provider based on the strength of the relationship, internal skills, and positive previous experience with HP hardware and associated support.

Simplified architecture, maximized results

Co-op’s Azure Stack HCI environment consists of four clusters—two for general purposes and two for databases—with three nodes running on each cluster. The company has approximately 2,000 instances of Windows Server across its physical and Hyper-V estates, with almost all of its current virtual workloads migrated to Azure Stack HCI. 

Because most of Co-op’s workloads running Azure Stack HCI are Azure Arc–enabled, the company can bring valuable Azure services into its HCI environment. For example, Co-op is using Azure Policy, Azure Firewall, and Microsoft Sentinel to help safeguard its environments. The company is also evaluating how it might benefit from the visibility and troubleshooting capabilities of Azure Monitor over its incumbent tooling to find what else it might retire as part of its ongoing consolidation work. Additionally, Co-op is examining other ways in which it might further utilize Azure Arc to drive greater platform visibility and management across its cloud and on-premises environments. 

For data analysis, Co-op uses Azure Synapse Analytics as its data platform, and it draws on Power BI for analytics and insights. The company is using Dynamics 365 and Power Apps to help transform its funeral care business and as part of a larger data-mastering initiative across Co-op. Part of the rationale to consolidate to Azure Synapse Analytics was to move toward a higher quality of data, mastered in the right place to better support decision-making processes, and to bring data and technology together. Finally, Co-op is exploring Azure solutions for containerization and managed database services as it continues to transform its infrastructure, and it’s in the process of implementing Azure-native Azure Virtual Desktop company-wide.

From consolidation comes flexibility

Co-op’s consolidation of its physical estate to Azure Stack HCI represents a big win for the retailer. By moving from a traditional three-tier to hyperconverged architecture, the company gains the versatility and scale of the cloud while maintaining the freedom to retain workloads on-premises as necessary. To that end, the migration to Azure Stack HCI extended years of support and security to long-running operating systems. As an added benefit, Co-op has also realized performance improvements. “So far, we’ve gained around a 30 percent performance improvement with Azure Stack HCI compared with our previous Hyper-V based workloads,” says Robertson.

The company’s newfound hybridity has given it greater flexibility. Co-op can now run truly hybrid workloads, like primarily deploying on-premises while handling disaster recovery in Azure or deploying on-premises and bursting to Azure for added scale to accommodate peak loads or manage periods of high consumption. 

The simplification and resilience of its new infrastructure means less outages and better employee experiences. With harmonized management across its hybrid environment and the added protection of tools like Monitor and Microsoft Sentinel, the company has reduced the potential for incidents and outages to better ensure that stores are stocked. And now that its IT teams are spending less time responding to issues, they can spend more time focusing on optimization and new developments. “With Azure Stack HCI and a simplified architecture, we’re enabling our staff to do their jobs better,” says Robertson. “They’re free to use their creativity to improve and innovate instead of having to spend time troubleshooting.”

More power gained, less power used

Perhaps the biggest benefit of its Azure Stack HCI instantiation is how it helps drive the company’s sustainability commitments and supports its core values. The Azure Stack HCI migration reduced Co-op’s datacenter footprint from 16 racks down to 4, which has significantly reduced its power consumption.

“Our Azure Stack HCI deployment has delivered a savings of roughly £400,000 a year on power and cooling alone compared with the C7000 blades we were running,” says Robertson. By choosing greater consistency and simplicity in its infrastructure, along with better outcomes for its people and communities, Co-op is continuing to lead the future by staying true to its past.

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