Tony's Fine Foods Delivers Non-Stop Customer Service with IBM and Vision Solutions

SACRAMENTO, Calif., March 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Tony's Fine Foods, a perishable foods distributor, has put into place new business continuity infrastructure to protect the mid-size company against unplanned interruptions, improve systems availability, and keep its warehousing and delivery operations running efficiently.

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Tony's Fine Foods is a family business based in Sacramento, Calif. specializing 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 minimize 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 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 Web sites are online for orders and other business requirements.

"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 General Manager, Global Midmarket. "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."

Learn more about new mid-sized business solutions from IBM.

About Vision Solutions

Vision Solutions, Inc. is the world's leading provider of high availability, disaster recovery and systems/data management solutions for IBM® Power Systems. With a portfolio spanning industry's most innovative and trusted HA technologies from iTERA™ and MIMIX® solutions to continuous data protection such as EchoStream for AIX, Vision keeps critical business information continuously protected and available. Affordable and easy-to-use, Vision products ensure business continuity, increase productivity, reduce operating costs and satisfy compliance requirements. Vision also offers advanced cluster management and systems management solutions along with support for IBM i, Windows, and AIX operating environments. As IBM's largest high availability Premier Business Partner (NYSE: IBM), Vision Solutions oversees a global network of partners and professionals to help customers achieve business goals. Vision Solutions publishes the quarterly e-book Business Continuity Today outlining current issues and best practices. Privately held by Thoma Bravo, Inc., Vision Solutions is headquartered in Irvine, California with offices worldwide. For more information, visit www.visionsolutions.com or call 800.957.4511.

SOURCE IBM