DHL has opened a huge data processing centre in Prague – the last of three sites around the world that are used to manage its operations. The site is progressively replacing its existing European data centres and runs alongside the sites at Scottsdale in California and Cyberjaya in Malaysia.
Already operations have moved to Prague from two London-based service centres along with Basle and Brussels.
Each site takes over responsibility for DHL’s entire worldwide network for an eight hour period that correspond to local working hours. The system has to cope with 850,000 active customers a month generating 1.3 billion transactions a year. In total the network has 2,600 business application servers and 130,000 desktops.
Stephen McGuckin, who heads DHL’s IT operation, points out that the three centre strategy means that there are no single points of failure in the infrastructure and the entire network can be managed from any one of the centres. Prague was chosen for the European centre because of the low cost base and available labour force.
DHL is investing some £342 million in the Czech Republic over five years.
