Case Study
Frigoscandia SPA
Leading Italian frozen food distributor relies on Stratus’ ALWAYS-ON SOFTWARE to meet SLAs and grow market share
Frigoscandia SPA delivers 17 million cartons of frozen food to the Italian market every year. Their customers include all of the leading supermarkets across the country, who expect the highest quality of service. Confident in its ability to grow its market share, the company invested in new premises and knew it also needed to update its IT infrastructure to meet its continuous availability and disaster recovery requirements.
Frigoscandia SPA had two different data centers on its premises that were located 1000m apart. These data centers were responsible for all of Frigoscandia SPA’s critical applications— supply chain, logistics, voice activation software (that enabled employees to work inside the refrigerated storage areas without using their hands) and payments.
The company’s initial approach to achieving fault tolerance was a Microsoft® cluster based solution with Fujitsu storage in each data center enabling synchronous replication. However, Frigoscandia SPA had experienced ongoing challenges with this approach primarily related to the replication, the number of physical servers needed and the complexity of management.
The Challenge
Concerned by the issues experienced with their existing cluster solution, Frigoscandia SPA approached ACME Consulting to find an alternative solution that would better support their growth plans and aggressive SLAs. ACME was tasked with finding a solution that would enable Frigoscandia SPA to maintain the two separate data centers for disaster recovery, virtualize the entire infrastructure to reduce the number of servers required and be easy to implement and manage.
In addition to all this, there was a need to ensure the applications were more robust and always on. For Frigoscandia SPA, even one minute of downtime would seriously impact the supply of food to their customers. And there were legal requirements that needed to be adhered to as well.
ACME considered a number of solutions from different vendors —both hardware and software based—against the criteria provided by Frigoscandia SPA to find the ultimate solution.
“We have seen significant benefits from installing everRun—it has enabled us to virtualize our entire IT infrastructure while ensuring our applications are more robust and always on and simplified our back-up and recovery operations.”
Daniele Revelant
IT Manager, Frigoscandia SPA
The Solution
Based on an evaluation of all of the solutions, ACME and Frigoscandia SPA agreed that Stratus everRun® Enterprise software was the only solution that could meet all of Frigoscandia SPA’s requirements. What’s more, it would also allow them to use standard x86 servers, negating the need for an expensive custom hardware solution.
ACME virtualized the entire infrastructure by installing two standard x86 servers running everRun while maintaining two physical domain controllers (one in each room). Upgrading the links between the data centers, allowing 10GB links for each pair, enabled them to maintain the two separate data centers. everRun is running on standard Fujitsu RX300S8 servers with 2 CPU 10 core (Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2660 v2 @ 2.20GHz) and 96GB of RAM. Each server also has two 10GB interfaces that connect them to the client network through redundant switches.
The Results
The installation of everRun succeeded in meeting all of Frigoscandia SPA’s virtualize their entire IT infrastructure and cut down the amount of servers required, it was simple to install (less than half an hour once the data centers were ready), has been easy to maintain and manage, and significantly simplified Frigoscandia SPA’s back-up and recovery operations.
everRun has provided Frigoscandia SPA with the always-on availability needed to ensure customer satisfaction throughout the supply chain and continue growing its market share.
“everRun was simple to install—less than half an hour once the data centers were ready— and is simple to maintain.”
Andrea Garattini
Lead consultant, ACME Consulting
About ACME Consulting
ACME Consulting was established in February 2000 as a consulting company in the IT field. Offering complete, integrated solutions to companies who want to renew and upgrade their IT infrastructure, ACME’s experience, both as a trainer and consultant, allows it to develop customized solutions to meet a customer’s needs. ACME employees constantly update their knowledge and the organization is proud of its staff’s continuing achievements and maintenance of high levels of certification recognized by major IT companies. ACME Consulting is a Stratus Partner, a Microsoft Silver Partner and a VMware® Professional Partner.
To learn more go to www.acmeconsulting.it.
About Stratus Technologies
Stratus Technologies’ solutions enable rapid deployment of always-on infrastructures, from enterprise servers to clouds, without any changes to your applications. Stratus products (software and servers) combined with Stratus people, enable customers to prevent downtime before it occurs, ensuring uninterrupted 24/7/365 performance of essential business operations.
To learn more, visit www.stratus.com.
