Pro à Pro
Sector
Activity
Food wholesaler Pro à Pro makes daily deliveries to thousands of canteens at schools, businesses, and retirement homes across France, as well as to conventional restaurants and eateries. The fast-growing company, which employs 2,800 people, sells a wide range of products (groceries, fresh and frozen food, beverages, etc.) to 40,000 customers.
In order to manage its business operations, Pro à Pro relies heavily on a custom-built, IBM i-based ERP system hosted on IBM Power servers. In early 2023, the wholesaler turned to Hardis Group to modernize, upgrade, and operate its IBM Power and x86 IT infrastructure. It entrusted the Cloud Operations team with the task of designing a new, more efficient and more resilient architecture, and of handling 24/7 administration.
Hardis submitted the best bid when it came to both the design of the new architecture—in terms of availability, performance, and incident resilience—and service-level guarantees. We were also impressed by the fact that their IBM i experts were determined to build a genuine, long-term partnership.
Bernard Ferran, CIO, Pro à Pro
Project objectives
- Outsource the operation of third-party-hosted IT infrastructure (IBM Power and x86 servers)
- Modernize the IBM i infrastructure
- Achieve performance and incident resilience gains
- Ensure reliable replication under the DRP
- Shorten data backup times
Work performed
- Designed a new IBM i architecture with a view to:
- Improving performance, resilience, and security
- Achieving simpler, faster, and more secure replication and data backup between the main site in Toulouse and the secondary site in Labège
- Deployed the new architecture:
- Replaced the IBM Power8 servers with the new IBM Power10 servers
- Environment replication: deployed Power10 servers and SAN storage racks at both sites
- Migrated applications, including the IBM i-based ERP system, to the new environment
- Backed up data on Dell servers, in addition to a tape-based solution, with replication of the main site to the secondary site
- Managed the information system (two IBM Power10 servers, six partitions, and around 50 VMs): monitoring, operation, backup, DRP, and environment security
Benefits
- Improved information-system performance and resilience
- Proven track record in IBM i and IBM Power environments
- Stringent control over certain operational processes