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Dell's Transformation of PRISM Inventory System with SingleStore for Real-Time Business Operations

 Dell's Transformation of PRISM Inventory System with SingleStore for Real-Time Business Operations - IoT ONE Case Study
Technology Category
  • Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
  • Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Industries
  • Buildings
  • Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions
  • Procurement
  • Warehouse & Inventory Management
Use Cases
  • Picking, Sorting & Positioning
  • Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • System Integration
The Challenge
Dell Technologies, a global enterprise, was facing challenges with its existing inventory and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Glovia. The system provided batch data updates with reports available every 30 minutes and was not integrated with Dell’s supply chain systems. This led to data disconnects and inefficiencies, which were not suitable for a fast-paced global enterprise. Glovia's reporting queries were consuming too much compute power, and its storage needs were rapidly increasing due to the requirement of storing substantial amounts of historical data for audit purposes. Dell needed to modernize its PRISM system and move from batch data updates to real-time streaming reports. The goal was to create a real-time inventory application with the speed and scale to meet the needs of the business within a year.
The Customer

Dell Technologies

About The Customer
Dell Technologies, founded by Michael Dell in 1984, is one of the largest companies in the world, with more than 165,000 employees across the globe. It ranks #31 on the Fortune 500 and is instrumental in changing the digital landscape worldwide, delivering solutions that help customers prepare for anything, anytime. Dell's enterprise procurement and third-party logistics systems have many moving parts, and data disconnects can lead to inefficiencies and wasted resources. The company needed to streamline its data footprint and optimize its inventory processes by modernizing its PRISM system and moving from batch data updates to real-time streaming reports.
The Solution
Dell Technologies chose SingleStore to modernize its PRISM system. SingleStore is a multi-model relational database built for speed, scale, and agility. It supports all major data types, including JSON objects, and ingests data directly from Apache Kafka. This enabled Dell to deploy an event-driven architecture delivering real-time data, accelerating time to insight for Dell inventory and ERP users. Dell runs SingleStoreDB Self-Managed in its virtual machine (VM) farms to avoid moving sensitive data, including inventory data, into the cloud. PRISM runs on a 20-node SingleStore cluster, adeptly deployed across data centers to ensure business continuity. With SingleStore, replication across data centers now occurs in real time. PRISM manages real-time dataflows and operational reporting that requires 1-2 years of data retention with SingleStore. It sends data that requires real-time and near real-time processing into the Enterprise Information System, which streams real-time and operational data into SingleStore through native Kafka ingestion.
Operational Impact
  • With the implementation of SingleStore, Dell Technologies now powers its inventory and ERP operations with real-time data built on event-driven architecture. The PRISM system can store and query JSON data as a column type to efficiently store and analyze multi-attribute objects. As Dell migrates PRISM to SingleStore, it is cross-training some of its Oracle experts on SingleStore, with assistance from SingleStore Support. This process is helping Dell to optimize their deployment and evolve the business. The team has ambitious plans to extend this functionality by flowing data from external sources into SingleStore for data reconciliation on both internal and external data. They also plan to use SingleStore’s ultrafast data streaming capabilities to power analytics, data visualization, and AI and machine learning via Power BI, Tableau, Domino, Data Robot, and other consuming applications.
Quantitative Benefit
  • After implementing SingleStore, analytic reports load within a minute, compared to the previous 30-minute batch reports.
  • PRISM has 1.87TB of data in memory and 3.6 TB of data in columnstore within the SingleStore clusters.
  • SingleStore’s combined rowstore/columnstore architecture and data compression are helping Dell save a massive amount of data storage.

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