Flagship Solutions Group (FSG) Helps Restaurant Supplier Maintain Appetite for Success

The Client

A leading family-owned and operated food distributor serving the Southeastern United States provides all manner of food, beverages, and other broadline restaurant supplies and equipment to independent eateries, restaurant chains, hotels, country clubs, institutional groups, and other foodservice operators through a line of exclusive brands.

In recent years the company has expanded beyond its home market of Florida into Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Today, the $2 billion entity serves its markets with more than 50,000 products inventoried across 13 state-of-the-art facilities delivered by a fleet of over 750 trucks.

The Challenge

Dealing with perishables on such a large scale makes efficient, resilient logistics and inventory management critical; inbound and outbound deliveries must be made accurately and on time.

The distributor runs SAP HANA on Oracle in a hybrid on-prem/cloud environment. But growth was straining the older IBM Power servers which ran core business systems. Flagship Solutions Group, an IBM Premier Business Partner, had been working with the company for several years and in fact had installed the current Power servers. It was only natural that they would turn to FSG for the next step in their digital transformation, and the implementation had to be seamless.

The Flagship Solution

FSG recommended and upgraded their systems to the IBM POWER9™-based Power Systems, which can dynamically scale compute and memory on-demand to handle the most data intensive workloads. The IBM POWER9 processor drives the world’s fastest supercomputers, yielding significant performance gains for the distributor’s “always on” operations.

Further, IBM Power Systems offer end-to-end security built-in at all layers in the stack – processor, systems, firmware, OS, and Hypervisor. With accelerated encryption built into the chip, data is protected while in motion and at rest. PowerVM® is the only hypervisor among all major competitors with no reported vulnerabilities.

Business Outcomes

Today, the food distributor benefits from the proven reliability of IBM POWER9™-based Power Systems servers to support mission-critical applications that enable continuous 24×7 operations. IBM servers ranked the most reliable for the 10th straight year with a maximum uptime of 99.9996% (2.1 minutes per server per year of unplanned downtime) – the highest of any non-mainframe Linux platform.

By migrating from IBM Power servers to next-generation IBM POWER9-based Power Systems, the distributor can still run all of the AIX and IBM i offerings on-premises or in the cloud without requiring retest and recertification, keep their core business applications running on Oracle or a DB2 environment, or run on a traditional VM for a seamless transition.

To learn more about Flagship and our skills working with IBM, please email us at: info@flagshipsg.com or call us at: 561-208-3941.