END USER INSIGHT

Tim Perkins , Director of IT , Walgreens Boots Alliance

What does your job role entail and what does this look like day to day ?

With the goal to champion and reimagine the health and well-being of every community in America , Walgreens uses BMC Software ’ s solutions to deliver on this . Here , Tim Perkins , Director of IT , Walgreens Boots Alliance , talks to me about why the organisation chose to work with BMC , some of the challenges it faced ahead of the collaboration , his involvement in the data centre side of the business and how the company is able to conquer the opportunities that lie ahead .

Currently I ' m responsible for data centre hosting and hybrid solutions . This involves Disaster Recovery and making sure there ' s the business acumen and understanding of our application roadmap so that we have a better understanding of how we move forward with our initiatives – whether it ' s on-prem or whether it goes to the cloud . With that , we have a heavy mix with our vendor management . We want to make sure that we have our managed services , so in the event that there ' s any issues from infrastructure , we have those support teams in place to support the application levels .

How far are you involved with Walgreens ’ data centre makeup ?

We have what ' s known as life cycle management , where we have a threeto-five-year period where we look at the infrastructure from compute storage , making sure those infrastructures are at a compliant level and that they don ' t go to an end-of-life support . We go through a budgeting refresh cycle periodically to make sure we can continue to meet those future growing demands on the applications .

How important is uptime and how do you manage the infrastructure to ensure smooth operation ?

From an uptime perspective , we take a lot of our business-critical applications and put them into high availability platforms . We do provide a faster mean time to recovery and failure based on how we can bring things back from a backup or relocate them from another location . That is a critical priority of ours , especially in areas where it ' s tied to pharmacy and to supply chain and logistics . Those are the www . intelligentdatacentres . com

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