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Tony's Fine Foods delivers non-stop customer service with IBM and Vision Solutions

Tony's Fine Foods delivers non-stop customer service with IBM and Vision Solutions

 

Tony’s Fine Foods, a US perishable foods distributor, has put new business continuity infrastructure into place to protect the midsized company against unplanned interruptions, improve systems availability and keep its warehousing and delivery operations running efficiently.

 

Tony’s Fine Foods is a family business based in Sacramento, California specialising in delivering a million dollars a day worth of perishable foods such as deli and bakery items, prepared salads, pastas, meats and cheeses to thousands of customers including grocery chains, delis, bakeries and restaurants.

 

As part of its commitment to customer service, Tony’s wanted to minimise the risk of unexpected business downtime and provide a seamless business for its customers, partners and sales representatives. The company selected Vision Solutions’ MIMIX HA for i5/OS (IBM i) as the foundation of a planned disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure. MIMIX helped the IT team migrate the entire system to a new IBM Power Systems server with minimal downtime. The system keeps processes moving smoothly across company operations and ensures websites are online for orders and other business requirements.

 

IT partners provide operating assurance

 

“We liked the IBM knowledge behind MIMIX, and it only takes 15 minutes a day to know everything is running right,” said Tony’s IT development manager, David Nasater. “It has become more cost-effective for smaller businesses like ours to provide the strongest backbone possible. IBM provides the hardware performance we need, and Vision Solutions has the DR capabilities to help us avoid an outage that could lead to disappointing a customer and impacting the business.”

 

In addition to the company’s primary distribution and strategic systems, Tony’s Fine Foods also runs logistics software for its third-party partners on a Power Systems server running AIX. To keep those applications available, Tony’s chose EchoCluster for AIX and EchoStream for AIX from Vision Solutions. In addition to data protection, EchoStream for AIX offers ‘dial back’ capabilities to return applications or databases to a previous point in time to solve a problem or check on a business or IT event.

 

“An effective business continuity strategy is vital to success in today’s highly connected and dynamic marketplace,” said Marc Dupaquier, IBM Global mid-market general manager. “The ability to keep your business operating under virtually any condition and quickly recover from disruptions is a competitive advantage for companies of all sizes.”