VAULT400 to Protect Food Service Company

June 4, 2013 Alex Woodie

Reinhart Foodservice, the largest independently owned food service distributor in the United States, has tapped United Computer Group to provide cloud backup and disaster recovery services for its IBM i environment. The company is using UCG’s VAULT400 solution to help minimize downtime of its critical IBM i applications.

Reinhart Foodservice (RFS) provides fresh produce, proteins, ingredients, supplies, and equipment to customers in 45 states. The company operates 30 warehouses around the country, and serves the East, South, and Midwest of the country through its own fleet of trucks.

RFS worked with North American Systems International, a value added reseller and IT services firm based in Bloomingtom, Minnesota, to implement VAULT400, a backup and recovery service that utilizes EVault‘s native IBM i backup agent to move backup data over the Internet to UCG’s data centers.

The VAULT400 offering is designed for environments with between 10 GB and 500 GB of data, and gives customers the option of recovering an IBM i environment to UCG’s IBM i backup servers in either 12 or 24 hours. UCG also provides a one-hour recovery time objective (RTO) using Maxava‘s high availability software.

RFS, which is owned by Reyes Holdings and is based in Rosemont, Illinois, opted for the 24-hour RTO. That gives the distributor the assurance that a glitch with its IBM i production environment doesn’t turn into a debilitating, multi-day outage. RFS also signed up to access a test partition on the UCG backup servers, giving its IT admins the capability to check the software before going live.

With several acquisitions completed the last few months, RFS is growing its reach and relying even more on the IBM i server. In February, the company went live with a new online ordering system, called TRACS Direct, that is designed to give customers more insight into their orders, including the capability to submit and track orders, manage recipes, generate reports, and analyze purchase history against RFS’ DB2 for i backend.