Forzani choses Data General's AViiON server

"As our business grew dramatically through numerous acquisitions, we were faced with the challenge of managing a large server farm plagued by dual systems that did not run efficiently. Lowering total cost of ownership while continually increasing the performance of our server environment became essential," explained Mike Flood, chief information officer of The Forzani Group Ltd. "Data General's outstanding technology and support have allowed us to strategically free up critical server and staff resources, putting us in a position to better manage the continued growth we anticipate."

Forzani is utilizing a single partitioned AV 25000 NUMA server and a clustered AV 8700 NT server, along with EMC CLARiiON storage systems, to support mission- critical applications for corporate and franchise operations, in Calgary and Montreal. Forzani's new computing environment, which runs both Windows NT and DG/UX, can be simply reconfigured to accommodate changing business and system needs with Data General's AVFlex, a comprehensive set of services and products that allows customers to easily reconfigure systems when business or application conditions change.

The solution has enabled Forzani to allocate resources more effectively and maximize the processing capabilities of the server environment, which hosts applications such as accounting, payroll, warehouse management and transaction applications. Forzani can now run multiple applications on one server securely by using AVFlex to partition the Windows NT and UNIX server environment, maximizing the processing power and high availability. With multiple offices, Forzani can also take advantage of the long-distance clustering and instant disaster recovery capabilities that add to the overall flexibility and performance of the environment.