Fujitsu Gives Produce Distributor Anthony Marano Company Fresh Start on Inventory Management

Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation today announced that Chicago-based produce distributor Anthony Marano Company has deployed Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST(TM) and PRIMERGY(R) servers and a Fujitsu ETERNUS(R) Storage Area Network (SAN) to ensure the performance and reliability of its custom, real-time inventory management application. The Anthony Marano Company reports that the complete Fujitsu server and storage solution is delivering a 100 percent performance improvement on back-office applications and the ETERNUS SAN is operating at double the speed of the company’s previous system.

The Anthony Marano Company delivers fresh produce to Chicago’s markets and renowned restaurants and eateries seven days a week from its 364,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art distribution center near downtown Chicago. Each day the company takes up to 3,000 orders for its highly perishable products. Of these orders, 90 percent require same-day delivery, often within hours of order placement.

The company operates in the complex commodities world of “price after sale,” where each member of the sales staff must have up-to-the minute information on both retail and wholesale pricing in order to sell produce according to the appropriate price structure.

Prior to implementing Fujitsu’s ETERNUS storage solutions and rapid transaction PRIMEQUEST and PRIMERGY servers, the Anthony Marano Company moved to a custom real-time inventory management platform running on multiple HP servers. Several issues, including a lack of redundancy and system board problems, caused the company to seek alternative IT solutions. The Anthony Marano Company turned to Fujitsu for a simplified solution that included redundant, Intel Itanium-based servers and supported the company’s Microsoft Windows environment.

“A business interruption can cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars and prevent us from delivering on commitments to customers. We wanted the most reliable infrastructure available on the Windows platform,” said Chris Nowak, chief technology officer at Anthony Marano Company. “By deploying solutions from Fujitsu, we achieved our redundancy goal and have seen 99.999 percent reliability and excellent performance, and avoided data center complexities, all without hiring additional staff. With Fujitsu, we are confident that the IT infrastructure can comfortably support our company’s 20 percent per year growth plan.”

As a result of hardware reliability and excellent customer service, Anthony Marano has now standardized on solutions from Fujitsu. In addition to a PRIMEQUEST server and ETERNUS SAN, the company runs its Microsoft Exchange 2007 Server on a Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 S3 server. A single PRIMEQUEST 540 server runs the inventory management application in one partition and Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, and Dynamics in a separate partition. The partitions can be booted separately, so a problem with one does not affect the other. All storage for the PRIMEQUEST server, as well as the SQL database, is handled by the Fujitsu ETERNUS 4000 SAN, which offers redundant disk drives and allows information to be shared across the two partitions.

“Our roots in mainframe computers taught us that to serve our customers well, we must continually achieve the highest levels of performance, reliability, and customer service -- all three equally, without any compromise,” said Richard McCormack, senior vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation. “Companies like the Anthony Marano Company achieve significant business benefits from Fujitsu’s complete server and storage solutions that increase enterprise productivity to better serve their customers.”