Retail giant Tesco has installed a new set of servers that will help it analyse sales and track stock wastage.

The new system comes from vendor Netezza and will be used to sift through terabytes of data from stores and storage centres to look for transactional discrepancies.

"The specific application is designed to find wastage such as stolen, destroyed, out-of-date or lost items," said Marcel Borlin, programme manager at Tesco. "It is an important function, as it affects the financial position of the company."

Tesco chose the system because of low purchase and cooling costs.

"The Netezza system needs literally a fraction of the space, power and cooling of our existing systems," said Brolin.

A year ago Tesco began a scheme to reduce its IT footprint by 50 per cent over the next five years.