J&B Group Keeps It Rolling With NetApp

NetApp, Inc. announced that J&B Group turned to NetApp for its storage needs to support its perishable foods production and distribution business. With NetApp storage supporting its virtual infrastructure, this $600M company keeps its inventory system online, keeps its delivery trucks moving, and gets products onto customers’ shelves faster, all while reducing storage equipment and costs.

J&B Group was founded in 1979, with its founder making all sales and deliveries himself. Since then, the company has grown to provide wholesale, branded products; cold storage; and transportation of meat, poultry, and deli food products across 10 Midwestern states. In all, J&B Group has more than 400,000 square feet of plant space and 3.6 million square feet of refrigeration capacity, and its trucks cover over 4.4 million miles each year. Through this growth, the technological challenge has been maximizing uptime for its inventory and distribution system, which directs the complicated process required to get products from warehouse to customer in less than 12 hours. With perishable products, delays are unacceptable and J&B Group’s aging SAN infrastructure was no longer performing or scaling effectively.

To help solve this problem, J&B Group worked with Xigent Solutions, an authorized VMware consultant, and Northland Systems, Inc., an IT solutions provider and NetApp reselling partner. With help from these partners, J&B Group was able to implement a NetApp FAS system with 80TB of storage running all critical systems. This system supports storage for both Windows file shares and the VMware environment that is made up of 58 virtual servers and more than 30 virtual desktop clients. With an eye on maximizing uptime and business continuity, J&B Group uses NetApp SnapMirror to replicate data every hour to another NetApp system in a disaster recovery site.

"NetApp provides the high availability and fast backup and recovery time we need for business continuance," said Chuck Ballard, Network and Technical Services manager at J&B Group. "Every week we ship millions of pounds of perishable goods and a system failure can mean losing product, revenue, and customers. We needed a storage infrastructure robust enough to give us maximum uptime but also flexible enough to support and scale with our virtual environment. NetApp not only protects our critical business systems but our IT infrastructure can now also help our business get to the next level."

Since installing NetApp storage to support its virtual infrastructure, J&B Group maintained its main objective of 100% uptime and kept costs to a minimum. The company keeps its products moving without worrying about the system bringing the trucks to a halt. NetApp’s storage efficiency technology helped increase utilization to 67%, and storage requirements for VMware virtual servers went from 4.5TB to 1.5TB, a 66% reduction. Reliability and the immense savings have motivated the company to also deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure. J&B Group expects storage requirements to be roughly 400GB instead of the 2TB – an 80% savings – thanks to NetApp deduplication and replication technology.

"With our technology, we’re helping our customers protect their business and gain the flexibility to do more with their infrastructure than they could before," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. "J&B Group provides a great example of how our virtualization and storage efficiency technologies can come together to increase availability, reduce costs, and help move business forward."