Customer Story
Nicholas & Company
Nicholas & Company used Assure iTERA HA to move to new hardware via role-swap
On-time delivery is a vital competitive issue in the foodservice industry, and Nicholas & Company stakes its reputation on meeting its customers’ needs. Continuous availability of technology including a warehouse management system is key to the company’s continued success, so a high availability solution is a fundamental business requirement.
As a broadline foodservice distributor, Nicholas & Company delivers food and other products to a wide range of customers, from the smallest restaurants to national fast-food chains. Investments in technology have helped the company continue to meet a key customer demand in this highly competitive industry: on-time delivery.
Nicholas & Company’s sales applications and warehouse management system run on IBM System i servers at the company headquarters in Salt Lake City. To protect its echnology investments and maintain its reputation for excellent service, the company began to look for a high- availability solution.
“Nicholas & Company is the largest broadline distributor in the U.S. that operates out of a single warehouse,” explained Russell Erickson, System Administrator, Nicholas & Company. “With receiving during the day and order picking at night, we can’t afford downtime.”
Plans to move the company’s main corporate Web site, email, and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) system to its in-house servers made high availability even more essential at the company.
“The company was looking for a reliable way to keep its systems up continuously, move the backup window off the main server, and have some disaster recovery capabilities in the future,” said Erickson.
A long-time user of IBM hardware, Nicholas & Company decided to upgrade its servers, move to the V5R4 release of the i5/OS operating system, and install Assure iTERA HA from Precisely.
The installation of Assure iTERA HA was completed by Erickson, based on his experience with the product. “It went very well, and there were no problems,” he said. “I had used Assure iTERA HA for about five years at another company, and I’ve been very impressed with the product itself and the support staff behind it,” he added.
