As part of the upgrade the company plans to roll-out a new store management system that is expected to improve its ability to monitor and interact with its remote sites.
The company is hoping the new store system will allow it to monitor its stores in real-time.
Michael Peck, general manager, information technology, at 7-11 said workloads on its systems have grown rapidly as the company has changed from processing around 7.5 million transactions per day from 175 stores four years ago to 11 million today.
The upgrade being completed in number of phases and it involves integrating a cluster of 19 IBM xSeries servers with the company's existing iSeries 840 server.
IBM was today holding up the roll-out as an affirmation of the 'on demand' computing concept behind its eServer hardware platform.
According to IBM the eServer platform is a technology agnostic allowing applications and operating systems that commonly run on separate Intel-based hardware to co-exist and interoperate.
IBM has faced tough competition in a market where computing capacity has become increasingly cheaper to acquire. That's led to a proliferation of organisations with small and medium size Intel-based servers running a variety of operating systems.
IBM is now betting that the hardware environments are becoming too complex to manage and that CIOs will be looking for a way to simplify them and expand capacity without losing their current investment.
IDC yesterday released a report advising business that they could make substantial gains from consolidating their applications on to single hardware platforms.
The report, commissioned by IBM and based on a study of six companies with comparable IT requirements that had migrated to the iSeries platform, found that on average the group cuts its costs by around 25 percent over three years.
According to IDC most of the savings came from reducing hardware costs and down time, on average saving a total of around US$135,000 per every 100 users.
However, critics have argued that the report covered too narrow a range of companies to be considered useful.
According to Peck the strategy has generally been successful in 7-Eleven's case. However, he has noted some drawbacks.
-The good news is I've got one person [managing the systems] the bad news is I'm single point sensitive," he said.
And he later added -if the primary dies, everything dies".
