Coolshop is one of the webshop heavyweights in Denmark. Coolshop started out in the market for games and games consoles, but has now branched into a great number of product categories, including Beauty, Home & Kitchen, Sports & Leisure and Garden & Outdoor.
Coolshop is also represented in several markets abroad, with webshops in Norway, Sweden, Finland, England, Germany and many other countries. This means that Coolshop has a great volume of traffic to its servers, and Coolshop’s server park is growing at the same rate as the company itself.
Karsten Thomsen is the IT Manager for Coolshop, and he has a strong focus on the operating environment:
“In our industry, you have to be able to handle the daily load where uptime and stability are key. And then there are those special days, such as Black Friday, where we know in advance that our infrastructure will come under heavy pressure. These peaks must also be accommodated,” says Karsten Thomsen.
Coolshop thus needs an operations partner with the required knowhow and capacity. That partner is Netic in Aalborg, who has been Coolshop’s preferred partner since 2011. Karsten Thomsen is happy with that choice:
“Our previous operations partner was one of the big hosting companies, but at Netic, I feel that I’m more than just another customer. We have a close and personal professional relationship , and they go that extra mile – even to the extent that they are willing to provide support for jobs that are not covered by our contract.”
Coolshop’s business depends on the webshop being open 24/7/365 – or put simply: Always! One example is Coolshop’s English subsidiary which operates with change windows at night. These are times when the servers can be shut down briefly to make changes. And here, Netic has proven to be very flexible:
“It can actually be difficult to get suppliers to accept nightly change windows, but we quickly saw that, regardless of the time of night or morning, Netic’s consultants were always available. This has been so great for us. At one time, we had 36 hours’ downtime on our SAP environment to perform a major upgrade. Here, Netic also stepped up. We have absolutely no complaints.”
“It can actually be difficult to get suppliers to accept nightly change windows, but we quickly saw that, regardless of the time of night or morning, Netic’s consultants were always available. This has been so great for us. At one time, we had 36 hours’ downtime on our SAP environment to perform a major upgrade. Here, Netic also stepped up. We have absolutely no complaints.”
Coolshop has started talks with Netic to extend their cooperation to also cover operation of database servers. To Karsten Thomsen, this makes good sense.
“We can’t have know-how about everything in house. Sometimes, it is simply a better option to work with a supplier instead. A good example of where it is best to outsource is the operation of database servers. We are very pleased with our cooperation with Netic, so it’s an easy decision to place this task with them,” says Karsten Thomsen and continues: “Thinking back, I don’t recall us ever having any problems – and if we did, Netic wasn’t to blame.” Once, some Cisco routers rebooted spontaneously, but Netic’s consultants reacted promptly. We were informed, and the problem was solved.”
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