Vision Touts High Availability Install at Food Distributor
March 23, 2010 Alex Woodie
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Tony’s Fine Foods, a food distributor in Sacramento, California, has installed high availability software to protect its i/OS and AIX applications running on IBM Power servers, Vision Solutions announced last week. The installation included a combination of Vision’s MIMIX, EchoCluster, and EchoStream software installed on a Power Systems Model 570. Every day, Tony’s Fine Foods delivers $1 million-worth of perishable deli and bakery items, prepared salads, pastas, meats, and cheeses to thousands of customers in the Western United States. The time-sensitive nature of Tony’s business requires operations to continue 24 hours per day–a requirement that extends from the warehouse to the trucks to the data center and Web-based ordering systems. Tony’s manages its operations using a mix of ERP, warehouse management, and third-party logistics applications that run under i/OS and AIX environments on System i and System p servers. These advanced 64-bit business systems are legendary for their reliability, but cannot protect against every unforeseen disaster. To maintain its level of customer service, management for the 75-year-old company decided it needed a way to protect against unexpected downtime, according to a 2008 case study on the Vision Web site. “If we had a system failure, some of the costs could include having employees idle or paying overtime to get back on track,” Tony’s IT director, Mark Geery, stated in Vision’s case study. “But there’s one thing that’s actually priceless that we can’t risk losing: the trust of a customer.” Tony’s selected Vision to provide disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) protection. Specifically, MIMIX was installed to replicate i/OS applications between the primary and the secondary System i servers, while EchoCluster and EchoStream were installed to replicate data within the AIX environment. The software has worked well, according to Tony’s IT development manager, David Nasater. “We liked the IBM knowledge behind MIMIX, and it only takes 15 minutes a day to know everything is running right,” Nasater stated in a press release. “It has become more cost-effective for smaller businesses like ours to provide the strongest backbone possible.” Vision adds that, in addition to high availability protection, the EchoStream product provides continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities, or so-called ‘dial back’ capabilities, that allows them return applications or databases to a previous point in time to solve a problem or check on a business or IT event.
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