Food Distributor Taps DSC for IBM i HA Service

November 15, 2011 Alex Woodie

Hispanic food distributor Diaz Foods is protecting the uptime of its IBM i-based applications through SafeData HA, a high availability hosting solution offered by Data Storage Corp.

Diaz Foods began 21 years ago as a Hispanic food distributor serving a chain of five Diaz Foods stores in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. Over the years, the distribution company has expanded its coverage, and today Diaz Foods imports and distributes approximately 6,000 different products to 5,000 customers in 25 eastern states and Sweden.

In support of Diaz Foods’ business is a fleet of semi trucks, a quarter of a million square feet of office and warehouse space, and an ERP system from Retalix. That IBM i-based application can run nearly indefinitely thanks to Diaz Foods’ use of DSC’s SafeData HA service.

With SafeData HA, data from applications is replicated in real time to backup servers housed in a DSC (formerly SafeData) data center. DSC says its SafeData HA customers can be up and running on the backup server in 15 minutes or less after declaring an emergency. DSC also offers data vaulting service on IBM i servers through its SafeData Vault, which is based on Asigra‘s agentless backup technology.

Diaz Foods systems administrator Lisa Willingham explains the company’s high availability decision. “We decided to go with the HA service because, as a company, we cannot afford any downtime,” she states in a press release. “It is like the insurance policy you hope you never have to use. While Diaz Foods is not a small company, we still have a small IT staff. It is comforting knowing that we have a backup plan and a strong partner to be there for us when the unthinkable happens. In addition to the data recovery aspects of the service, a bonus is that we can switch to our ‘backup’ AS/400 and keep our business running while we do system maintenance and PTFs.”