Case Study: Drakes Supermarkets achieves instant recovery and reduced downtime with Riverbed SteelFusion

Drakes Supermarkets - Customer Case Study

Drakes Supermarkets is Australia’s largest independent grocery retailer with more than 55 stores, over AUD$1 billion in annual revenue and some 6,000 employees. Many stores sit in remote locations and were hampered by 1 Mbps BDSL links and frequent network outages that interrupted POS, pricing and ordering, forced costly travel for repairs and could take up to two days to restore—threatening sales, customer experience and inventory accuracy.

Drakes upgraded WAN connectivity to fibre with Telstra and deployed Riverbed SteelFusion to centralise store IT in the data centre (one server per store with caching, virtualization and WAN optimization). The change cut in‑store infrastructure, sped backups and management, and enabled instant recovery (about one hour versus days), reduced travel and operating costs, accelerated new store onboarding and can save up to AUD$100K per outage.

Drakes Supermarkets

Craig Flanagan

IT Support Manager