Retail
Majid Al Futtaim operates one of the largest shopping mall portfolios in the Middle East, with flagship destinations and community malls spanning multiple emirates and neighboring markets. Behind every mall’s customer-facing experience sits a substantial back-of-house data and infrastructure footprint, covering everything from point-of-sale systems and security monitoring to building management and tenant network services, all of which depend on reliable, fast local storage at each site.
This case study covers how Zen helped Majid Al Futtaim modernize the data storage infrastructure underpinning 27 shopping malls, why an aging storage layer had become a growing operational risk, and how the upgrade delivered measurable gains in both transaction speed and energy efficiency across the portfolio.
Each mall in the portfolio runs its own local server room supporting point-of-sale transaction processing, CCTV and access-control recording, and the building management systems that control lighting, HVAC, and escalators. Much of this infrastructure had been deployed in phases over more than a decade, meaning individual malls were running storage hardware of varying age, performance, and remaining vendor support, with no consistent baseline across the portfolio.
The operational impact of this inconsistency showed up most visibly during peak trading periods. Point-of-sale transaction processing would occasionally slow during high footfall events such as major sales weekends or holiday periods, precisely the moments when reliable, fast checkout matters most to both tenants and shoppers. Storage hardware nearing end of life also carried a higher risk of failure, and a failed drive in a mall’s server room could mean lost CCTV footage, a building management outage, or a point-of-sale disruption depending on which system it supported.
There was also a cost dimension. Older storage hardware draws meaningfully more power per unit of capacity than current-generation equipment, and across 27 server rooms running continuously, that difference in energy draw added up to a substantial and avoidable portion of each mall’s facilities operating cost.
Zen worked with Majid Al Futtaim’s regional IT and facilities teams to design a standardized storage refresh that could be deployed consistently across all 27 malls, replacing aging drive arrays with current-generation, high-throughput storage while keeping each site’s existing server and networking equipment wherever it remained fit for purpose, avoiding an unnecessarily disruptive full hardware replacement.
The new storage layer was selected specifically for two priorities: sustained throughput under the kind of transaction bursts seen during peak retail periods, and lower power draw per terabyte compared to the hardware it replaced. Each mall’s point-of-sale, CCTV, and building management systems were migrated onto the new storage in a planned sequence, with performance benchmarks captured before and after each site’s cutover so the team could confirm the expected gains were actually being realized on the ground, not just on paper.
Retail environments cannot tolerate downtime during trading hours, so every mall’s migration was scheduled overnight, outside operating hours, with a defined rollback plan in case any single site encountered an unexpected issue. Zen’s regional deployment team moved mall to mall over a structured multi-month rollout, standardizing configuration as they went so that IT staff visiting any of the 27 sites would find a familiar, consistent setup rather than a bespoke configuration per location.
Facilities and security teams at each mall were briefed ahead of their site’s migration window so that CCTV monitoring coverage and point-of-sale support could be temporarily adjusted if needed, though in practice the overnight migration windows meant most sites experienced no disruption to daytime retail operations at all.
Across the 27 malls, transaction processing throughput improved by 3x compared to the previous storage layer, measured directly through point-of-sale system benchmarks during peak trading simulations. Energy consumption tied to the storage layer dropped by 60%, a meaningful contribution to each mall’s overall facilities energy footprint given that server rooms run continuously, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Beyond the measurable performance and efficiency gains, the standardized configuration across all 27 sites has simplified ongoing support meaningfully. Facilities IT staff can now move between malls and immediately recognize the storage setup, and spare-parts inventory can be pooled across the portfolio rather than each mall needing its own unique set of vendor-specific replacement components.
Majid Al Futtaim’s facilities technology team evaluated the refresh as a portfolio-wide standardization project rather than 27 separate procurement decisions, and selected Zen based on the ability to deliver a single, repeatable deployment playbook that could scale consistently across every site while still accommodating each mall’s specific existing equipment and scheduling constraints. That consistency has proven just as valuable operationally as the raw performance improvement itself.
The rollout also gave Majid Al Futtaim’s leadership a clearer, portfolio-wide view of infrastructure age and risk for the first time. Rather than relying on each mall’s local IT contact to flag an aging server room individually, the standardized deployment came with a shared monitoring baseline, letting the regional team see at a glance which of the 27 sites were furthest into their hardware lifecycle and plan future refresh budgets well ahead of any component reaching end of life.
With the refreshed storage layer now the standard baseline across the portfolio, new malls joining the Majid Al Futtaim network are provisioned against the same configuration from day one rather than starting from a bespoke build. Zen continues to support the deployed infrastructure with proactive monitoring across all 27 sites, flagging any drive nearing end of life before it becomes an operational issue.
“We went into this expecting a hardware refresh. What we got was a portfolio-wide standard that’s made our facilities IT support genuinely easier across every one of our malls, not just faster checkouts.” — Head of Facilities Technology, Majid Al Futtaim