Chemist Warehouse partners with HPE

Chemist Warehouse has announced Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will modernise its data centre with a hyperconverged platform and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment to improve productivity for onsite and remote staff.

Set to provide a strong foundation for innovation and increase energy efficiency, the new solutions will be delivered through HPE’s high-performing and versatile ProLiant servers.

Chemist Warehouse serves more than 1.5 million customers each week, whether in-store, online, or through third party providers such as Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace. The pharmacy giant has a growing footprint in New Zealand, China and Ireland.

As a result of its rapid growth, Chemist Warehouse aims to transform its data centre, completely overhauling its existing IT Infrastructure, to improve operations for better sales and customer experiences, and adapt to recent shifts to remote working experiences. By collaborating with HPE to design a bespoke VDI solution using HPE ProLiant servers, Chemist Warehouse gains foundational support to implement future solutions to enhance automation and sustainability efforts.

“Our commitment to modernising our IT is critical for us to achieve our transformation goals and continued growth. With reduced administrative overheads, we can reallocate resources to innovation,” says Simon Hibbert, General Manager of IT at Chemist Warehouse.

“The initial beneficiaries will be our staff, which will experience improved productivity and in return, will have a positive, downstream impact to our customers in-store and online.”

HPE is helping Chemist Warehouse transform its IT with an infrastructure environment delivered through HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus servers using 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors that take advantage of the latest VMware vSAN all-flash capabilities for a software-defined experience. The upgraded data centre will also increase energy efficiency by consuming 30% less power than its existing solution, helping to advance Chemist Warehouse’s sustainability goals.

“We look forward to accelerating our collaboration with Chemist Warehouse to increase efficiency and build a foundation for future growth,” says Andrew Foot, general manager of Compute for HPE South Pacific. “The new environment, enabled by HPE ProLiant servers, will deliver better performance, energy efficiency, user experience and lower latency.”

The current solution is for core systems for the Chemist Warehouse Australia operation.