Increased capacity and managed service model help food service equipment supplier deliver superior customer service online

Edward Don & Company

Founded in 1921 as a janitorial supply company in Chicago, Edward Don & Company is the nation’s largest distributor of food service equipment and supplies. The company’s roughly 1,000 employees service more than 70,000 customers, including independent restaurants, national chains, hospitals and healthcare facilities, country clubs, schools and universities, government institutions, amusement parks, cruise ships and more.With an inventory of more than 12,000 products and a global network of more than 3,000 “Don-approved” suppliers, the North Riverside, Ill. family-owned company boasts a motto, “Everything but the food.” The company also has a design arm that assists customers with new kitchen planning, construction, remodeling and equipment replacement.

Unlike its early days when salespeople traveled the country to work with customers and take orders on paper, a significant percentage of Edward Don’s business comes via the Web – and that number continues to grow each year. Registered customers can log-in, browse the online catalog and place orders as-needed.This reliance on technology has its risks as well as rewards. On the reward side, it is quick, easy and efficient both for customers and the company itself. There is a risk, however, if the ordering system becomes unavailable due to over-capacity. Customers using the Web don’t like to wait; if they log-in and are unable to place or complete orders, often times they will abandon the site and go to a competitor – perhaps permanently. With so much at stake – Web-based orders account for millions of dollars of revenue each day – it is imperative that the Web-ordering system be available to customers 24 x 7 x 365, no matter what is happening internally or externally.

Challenges

Understanding what was at stake, Edward Don installed a disaster recovery (DR) solution soon after moving into online sales. The solution essentially was an arrangement to rent server space and software from an integrator; Edward Don had to manage the system itself using internal resources. While not ideal, the solution was sufficient – until the company moved to the SAP ERP system running on the IBM i platform in 2009. 

At that point, deficiencies in the old solution began to appear. Most critical was the lack of capacity, including RAM and CPU processing power. The greater load the new SAP system was putting on the DR system – to the tune of 50-million database transactions daily, requiring eight (8) TB of storage – was overwhelming it. Data transfer from production to the DR target database was too slow, which meant if a problem occurred in production there was no viable backup to keep the online ordering system running seamlessly.

“We knew in March 2011 we were two years into a three-year contract with our old DR provider, and we hadn’t been able to fully and successfully execute a failover test on SAP says George Barwacz, operations manager at Edward Don. “The solution we had was under-powered, so we didn’t even try. We felt like we were treading water and putting the business at risk.”

Since these performance issues could have such a potential impact on customer satisfaction, in late March 2011 Edward Don issued an RFP to find a new DR provider. One of the key requirements was finding a partner that had an extensive depth and breadth of knowledge in SAP running on IBM i.

“We have a strong level of expertise internally in IBM i, but not in the SAP component,” Barwacz says. “We needed a partner that really understood the nuances of SAP and could install a DR solution that was able to handle the volume and speed of transactions in our system.”

Solution

“Back in 2009, we knew people at companies that had implemented SAP without having much in-house expertise in Basis,” Barwacz says. “I asked them how they had done it, and they said they were working with Symmetry. Their high level of satisfaction with Symmetry’s work led us to our present relationship.”

When Edward Don issued the RFP, it was natural for company officials to include Symmetry, particularly since the integrator has SAS 70 Type II certification on the DR side.

“There was already a relationship there, an embedded trust,” says Barwacz. “Symmetry professionals know some aspects of our landscape better than we know it ourselves, which sped up the process and took out some of the learning curve and guesswork others might have to do.” 

Symmetry recommended moving to a cloud-based solution running on Mimix® Availability™, a scalable, easy to manage, high availability (HA)/DR application from Vision Solutions. Mimix is the market leader in DR software for IBM , and Edward Don already owned the application. By moving to a cloud-based solution, Symmetry would take overall management and maintenance of the system, freeing Edward Don’s internal resources for other mission-critical tasks.

Enablement of the new DR environment took roughly two weeks start to finish. Most of that time was taken up waiting for tapes to spin in order to restore the production data to the target system. Since orders come in from all over the nation on a 24 x 7 basis, there was never a time that Symmetry could take down the production system in order to perform the cutover. All the work and testing had to be done without interfering with the normal course of business – which Symmetry was able to do.

“It was very fast and efficient, and most importantly invisible to our customers,” Barwacz says.

Results

The primary goal of the project was to create an HA environment for SAP that would keep the business operating normally even if the backup system had to take over. That goal has been achieved.

While Symmetry’s Cloud environment actually has the CPU and RAM capacity to run twice as fast as Edward Don’s production system, it was determined that 75 percent performance writing from production to the target system would be sufficient for now.

“We can always increase the speed if needed,” Barwacz says. “It’s actually an easy adjustment. But more speed requires a higher monthly investment. After looking at all the factors, we agreed that 75 percent performance was the most cost-effective solution for us.” 

One of the improvements in DR Barwacz was looking to make was the ability to create realistic tests of the system’s ability to respond. Because the old system was under-powered, Edward Don had not been able to simulate disaster scenarios to check system response. That was no longer an issue with Symmetry’s cloud-based solution.

“We now have the capacity we need to perform realistic failover and HA tests,” he says. “We’ve taken hope out of the equation.”

Moving to a cloud-based solution has also yielded the benefits Barwacz was looking for in terms of staff time and utility.

“With our old solution, we spent an inordinate amount of time managing hardware and software,” he says. “It was a high priority since so much of our success depends on system availability. Now, we don’t even have to think about it. Symmetry designed an HA environment that is specific to Edward Don and our needs, and manages it all for us. Rather than spending their time monitoring and maintaining infrastructure, our internal resources have moved on to more value-added projects. It is really helping us move the business forward.”