SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - February 10, 2010) - NetApp (
NASDAQ:
NTAP) announced today that
J&B Group turned to NetApp for its storage needs to support its perishable
foods production and distribution business. With NetApp storage supporting
its virtual infrastructure, this $600M company keeps its inventory system
online, keeps its delivery trucks moving, and gets products onto customers'
shelves faster, all while reducing storage equipment and costs.
J&B Group was founded in 1979, with its founder making all sales and
deliveries himself. Since then, the company has grown to provide wholesale,
branded products; cold storage; and transportation of meat, poultry, and
deli food products across 10 Midwestern states. In all, J&B Group has more
than 400,000 square feet of plant space and 3.6 million square feet of
refrigeration capacity, and its trucks cover over 4.4 million miles each
year. Through this growth, the technological challenge has been maximizing
uptime for its inventory and distribution system, which directs the
complicated process required to get products from warehouse to customer in
less than 12 hours. With perishable products, delays are unacceptable and
J&B Group's aging SAN infrastructure was no longer performing or scaling
effectively.
To help solve this problem, J&B Group worked with Xigent Solutions, an
authorized VMware consultant, and Northland Systems, Inc., an IT solutions
provider and NetApp reselling partner. With help from these partners, J&B
Group was able to implement a NetApp® FAS system with 80TB of storage
running all critical systems. This system supports storage for both
Windows® file shares and the VMware® environment that is made up of 58
virtual servers and more than 30 virtual desktop clients. With an eye on
maximizing uptime and business continuity, J&B Group uses NetApp
SnapMirror® to replicate data every hour to another NetApp system in a
disaster recovery site.
"NetApp provides the high availability and fast backup and recovery time we
need for business continuance," said Chuck Ballard, Network and Technical
Services manager at J&B Group. "Every week we ship millions of pounds of
perishable goods and a system failure can mean losing product, revenue, and
customers. We needed a storage infrastructure robust enough to give us
maximum uptime but also flexible enough to support and scale with our
virtual environment. NetApp not only protects our critical business systems
but our IT infrastructure can now also help our business get to the next
level."
Since installing NetApp storage to support its virtual infrastructure, J&B
Group maintained its main objective of 100% uptime and kept costs to a
minimum. The company keeps its products moving without worrying about the
system bringing the trucks to a halt. NetApp's storage efficiency
technology helped increase utilization to 67%, and storage requirements for
VMware virtual servers went from 4.5TB to 1.5TB, a 66% reduction.
Reliability and the immense savings have motivated the company to also
deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure. J&B Group expects storage
requirements to be roughly 400GB instead of the 2TB -- an 80% savings --
thanks to NetApp deduplication and replication technology.
"With our technology, we're helping our customers protect their business
and gain the flexibility to do more with their infrastructure than they
could before," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and
Alliances at NetApp. "J&B Group provides a great example of how our
virtualization and storage efficiency technologies can come together to
increase availability, reduce costs, and help move business forward."
Discuss this news in the NetApp Community, where you can exchange thoughts
and ideas on a variety of topics with our community members. Collaborate
with our company, engage in conversation with NetApp leaders and employees,
our customers, and partners. Participate in our passion to go further,
faster. Join now at
www.netapp.com/us/communities.
For more information about NetApp virtualization solutions, visit
www.netapp.com/us/solutions/infrastructure/virtualization/server/.
For more information about NetApp deduplication technology, visit
www.netapp.com/us/products/platform-os/dedupe.html.
For more information about Xigent Solutions, visit
www.xigentsolutions.com/.
For more information about Northland Systems, visit
www.northlandsystems.com.
About NetApp
NetApp creates innovative storage and data management solutions that
accelerate business breakthroughs and deliver outstanding cost efficiency.
Discover NetApp's passion for helping companies around the world go
further, faster at
www.netapp.com.
NetApp, the NetApp logo, Go further, faster, and SnapMirror are trademarks
or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other
countries. VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. Windows is a
registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. All other brands or products
are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and
should be treated as such.
Contact Information: Press Contact:
Nathan Phillips
NetApp
(408) 822-7284
nathan.phillips@netapp.com