Case Study: Dell achieves uninterrupted holiday traffic handling and real-time deal management with Microsoft Azure

Dell Uses Cloud Solution to Manage Online Traffic, Customer Deals During the 2013 Holiday Season

Dell, a global computer manufacturer with a large online retail presence, needed to handle a massive surge of shoppers and better manage time-sensitive Black Friday–to–Cyber Monday deal campaigns in 2013. Past holiday periods brought site downtime and lost sales when customers clicked expired or sold-out offers, so Dell required scalable infrastructure and real-time deal metrics to protect conversions and improve agility.

Dell moved its deals page to Microsoft Azure, using Visual Studio tools, service-bus workers, and off-site caching so business users could publish, expire, and monitor deals in real time. The cloud site handled over 920 million hits during the weekend (more than 140 million originating on Azure), peaked at over 2,000 page transactions per second with zero downtime and low VM utilization, was deployed in three weeks, incurred negligible cost, and delivered improved conversion management and business agility.

Dell

Jim Keane

Executive Director for Site Operations