PFD Food Services opens the door to Amazon S3 Cloud Storage through Commvault

To support business growth and respond to the changing demands of the industry, PFD sought to modernise its data management strategy and information infrastructure, ensuring speed and flexibility.

"Food distribution is a fast and often unforgiving business; there is a narrow window to match supply and demand for customers, while the market is fiercely competitive," said Richard Cohen, Chief Information Officer of PFD. "We have to do everything we can to give ourselves that competitive advantage, which means the free flow of strategic business information. Systems downtime is simply not an option."

The modernisation of the food distributor’s data management strategy has coincided with the establishment of a second data centre, acting as a source for essential back-ups, decreasing the risk significantly. The data centre also operates as a corporate hot site, providing rapid up-to-the-minute failover if required.

Rolling out in a staged approach alongside trusted advisor Venn IT, PFD initially ran backups to tape in parallel with backups to Amazon S3 cloud storage, allowing them to demonstrate the technical viability as well as cost comparison. The company has since moved away from tape completely and by leveraging Amazon S3 and Commvault, they have stripped out 34 percent in costs from tape management, media handling, storage and resources due to manual intervention.

"The team at Venn IT enabled a programmatic approach to modernising our information management strategy, and Commvault was critical through this process of transitioning data across tape, disk and now cloud," said Cohen. "The functionality and technical maturity of Commvault gave us the assurance to seamlessly take the next step to embrace Amazon’s S3 cloud storage – Again helping us reduce costs and risk further, while ensuring business continuity."

Cohen says the business has confidence that if there is a failure in the primary data centre, the data stored in the cloud can be up and running within an hour. Following the success of this migration, Venn IT will help Cohen achieve further cost savings by archiving older files to Amazon’s Glacier cloud storage platform.

Cohen said, "Our goal is to provide the business with a reliable, resilient and risk-free environment – taking a programmatic approach to data management. We have achieved this by harnessing state of the art technology to strip out costs, modernise our information strategy and guarantee durability and protection of our strategic data assets."

"Many customers like PFD Food Services want trusted advice as they take their journey to the cloud – Commvault is that trusted partner. We have strong integration with Amazon Web Services, and are proud to provide PFD with the simplicity and assurance to take their data management to the next level with Commvault and AWS," said Bryan Stibbard, Area Vice President for Commvault Australia and New Zealand.