United Natural Foods Teams With EMC

EMC Corporation announced that United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI), North America’s largest distributor of organic and natural food products, worked with EMC to undertake an IT transformation and data center consolidation that significantly improved its disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities and provides savings in technology costs and energy consumption.

To enable UNFI’s ongoing aggressive growth and expansion, as well as support its mission of sustainability and energy efficiency, the company wanted a more scalable and cost-effective technology infrastructure. Working with EMC Consulting, UNFI implemented an IT transformation, data center consolidation and protection strategy that combined its multiple data center operations into a single production location and added significantly enhanced disaster recovery capabilities with a new business continuity strategy and recovery location.

John Stern, Senior Vice President and CIO at UNFI said: "Working with EMC, we found accountability, candor, trust and mutual respect, which combined with their experience, gave us a great deal of comfort in partnering with EMC on a project of this magnitude and of this importance."

Joshua Sigel, Vice President of IT Operations and Applied Technologies at UNFI said: "As we strive to serve our customers more effectively and continue our rapid growth, this consolidation, transformation and protection effort has established a solid foundation upon which UNFI can now build. UNFI’s integrated storage strategy is based on a highly flexible EMC Symmetrix® storage system, which means we are now poised for a private cloud approach optimized for scalability, performance, data replication, improved data access and application availability."

Transformation
Brings Enhanced Sustainability Benefits
The IT transformation project also helps UNFI further its mission to establish and support a green and sustainable data center architecture. Data center consolidation and server virtualization reduced UNFI’s energy and power consumption and the newly installed hardware is also far more energy efficient than the old systems it replaced.  The new data center even uses power generated by a solar array located on the roof of the company’s Dayville, Conn. distribution center.

UNFI’s Tom Dziki Chief Human Resources Officer and Senior Vice President of Sustainability said: "We were able to reduce our physical footprint and lower our power consumption, as well as our heating and cooling requirements through essentially unplugging and virtualizing servers, which provides a tremendously positive impact from a green perspective. UNFI’s corporate mission focuses on the delivery of superior service to our customers, the distribution of quality products, and environmental sustainability, and this IT transformation project helps UNFI to further each of these goals."

SiliconANGLE interviews Joshua Sigel about UNFI’s IT transformation project (video)