ESW

Scaling ecommerce transactions with Microsoft Azure

Sector: Software development, Direct-to-consumer ecommerce

Size: 1,001-5,000 employees

Technology used: Microsoft Azure

Solution area: Cloud and application development, Application innovation and migration

Powering global ecommerce

ESW is the global leader in direct-to-consumer ecommerce, helping top brands grow worldwide. Headquartered in Dublin, ESW employs 1,100 experts across Europe, the US, and Asia with the ambition to create moments that truly matter between its clients and their customers. ESW’s technology and human expertise delivers localised, customer-centric experiences across 200 markets, covering the entire shopper journey.

The challenge

ESW faced explosive global growth, expanding into India, China, the Middle East and Singapore. The company already managed over 300 million weekly transactions and its objectives were clear: deliver scalability, high availability and cost efficiency.

However, technical hurdles loomed. Legacy infrastructure hindered expansion and disaster recovery was inadequate. The business needed a robust, cloud-based architecture leveraging Microsoft Azure to handle massive data volumes, optimise perfomance and future-proof operations without spiraling acquisition and management costs. ESW required Spanish Point’s specialist expertise to fine-tune its Azure environment for peak performance and resilience.

The solution

Spanish Point designed and implemented a Microsoft Azure architecture using Premium Storage (SSDs delivering up to 5,000 IOPS and 200 MB/sec throughput) to meet ESW’s performance needs. This included 150 A-Series VMs for web servers, eight DS-Series VMs running SQL Server 2014, and 10 Premium disks for backups, databases, and logs, with Standard Storage for disaster recovery.

Technical deep dive

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The result

Transaction capacity increased by 300%, enabling ESW to envisage scaling beyond 500 million SQL Server transactions weekly while reducing overall costs. This Azure-based solution delivered the resilience and performance required for global expansion without the overhead of traditional infrastructure.

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“With Azure Premium Storage, we envisage that our current virtual machines can scale to handle more than 500 million SQL Server transactions weekly. This will reduce our overall costs, which is key as we scale globally.”
Connor SmythCTO at ESW

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Technical deep dive

The objective was to deliver infrastructure-led optimisation for high performance, cost efficiency, and global scalability. Spanish Point’s certified Azure experts re-architected ESW’s platform to support sustained growth. This required Azure Premium Storage, SQL Server, and a compute strategy capable of handling hundreds of millions of weekly transactions while ensuring disaster recovery and operational resilience.

Azure architecture and storage optimisation

Spanish Point engineered an Azure architecture built for speed and resilience. Premium Storage on SSDs delivered up to 5,000 IOPS and 200 MB/sec throughput, ensuring rapid transaction processing. A structured 10-disk layout—two for backups, two for system/temp databases, three for user data, and three for logs—optimised I/O patterns and minimized latency. This design supported high-volume workloads while Azure Standard Storage provided a cost-effective disaster recovery tier. Together, these elements formed a storage foundation capable of scaling beyond 500 million weekly transactions.