Perishable Distributors of Iowa: Building an Infrastructure to Protect the Supply Chain

Some 210 retail customers in a seven-state area depend on Perishable Distributors of Iowa (PDI) every week for clockwork delivery of approximately 425 loads of refrigerated goods. PDI's food product is 90-percent perishable and has a three- to four-day fresh cycle. If PDI's IT infrastructure slips up, the supply chain and $23 million in perishable commodities is at risk.

With its IT staff of 19 supporting a very complex 24 x 6.5 operation, PDI engaged MSI Systems Integrators (MSI) for assistance in the design, implementation and training of a virtualization and blade chassis environment that would provide much simpler, more reliable and cost-efficient protection for its supply chain.

"This initiative moves PDI closer to a lights out operation and provides significantly better sharing and utilization of resources than could be attained in a standalone environment." - Scott Hamilton
VP of Information Technology
Perishable Distributors of Iowa, LTD

The Challenges

Reducing risk was the goal. But PDI also wanted greater manageability, efficiency, productivity, cost and energy savings than it was getting from its original infrastructure. Its systems consisted of 15 standalone servers, between five and eight years old, with independent disks running either Linux or Windows® - plus two five-year-old IBM® 270 AS/400® servers. These systems ran everything from warehouse functions and accounting to sales, purchasing, transportation, and application development. Remote access for sales and purchasing agents further complicated things.

The reality was that managing all of the systems on different hardware platforms was becoming a challenge. And with the requirement of no-fail temperature control, business resiliency was a concern. Duplicating data for each individual operating system required full system saves on the staff's part every Saturday night at the office, and typically, it takes two weeks to instantiate a new server.

The PDI Solution

Specifically, PDI implemented IBM BladeCenter® H, an IBM DS4700 SAN with three trays of fiber attached DASD, six Intel® blades, an IBM JS22 i blade and a fiber attached IBM TS3200 Tape Library. VMware® has allowed over 75 percent of the Intel® based server systems-both Windows and Intel®- to be consolidated onto three IBM blades, and more will be converted during the next year. VMware's Virtual Center Manager resides on one additional blade, as does IBM's Tivoli® Storage Manager. The sixth blade is reserved for a spare.

The virtualization solution saves time and makes better use of PDI's resources by providing disk space in a SAN sharable between Windows, Linux® on Intel®, and the i-plus a blade chassis that contains both Intel® blades and the i.

The Benefits

The virtualized environment provides tremendous time savings, cross-platform flexibility, cost and energy savings, and long-term reliability and scalability to effectively protect the PDI supply chain.

Independent disks can now be added in just two hours instead of two weeks, and hardware can be shared for a wide variety of Linux- and Windows-based applications:

• Voice picking
• Email
• Imaging and workflow
• Vacation scheduling, vendor access for inventory management, pre-order/special buys for order entry, and PHP code created in-house
• Payroll
• EDI and EDI AS2 secure communications transport
• Contract freight management
• DNS and Active Directory
• Telephone accounting
• Timeclock functions
• Front-end purchasing
• Support use and remote access for sales/purchasing to both Intel and i systems
• Order taking
• Handheld order activities at the end-user site

In addition to time, PDI is saving money. The need to order new hardware has decreased; administrators can add disk space and easily manage blades through the SAN using a much smaller datacenter footprint, which significantly cuts down on power consumption.

There has been zero unplanned downtime in the first year of implementation. Thus, PDI has worked to ensure protection of its $23 million in perishable inventory. The current architecture enables PDI to implement data replication and data recovery within the next year or two at the SAN level and not have to come up with a different solution for each different type of server. This reliability lays a robust foundation for PDI's disaster recovery plan over the next five to 10 years.

With all systems now utilizing a shared disk environment that can be remotely replicated to another external site in a much shorter timeframe, PDI is uniquely prepared to take the next step for business continuity.

"This initiative moves PDI closer to a complete lights-out operation and provides significantly better sharing and utilization of resources than could be attained in a standalone environment," Scott Hamilton, PDI VP of Information Technology.