The Client
Papa Gino’s is a restaurant chain based in Dedham, Massachusets specializing in American-style pizza along with pasta, subs, salads, and a variety of appetizers. There are over 200 Papa Gino’s locations in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. In 1997 Papa Gino’s bought D’Angelo Sandwich Shops, another Massachusetts-based fast-food outlet specializing in sandwiches, from prior owner Yum! Brands (then known as Pepsico Inc.’s Pizza Hut unit). Plans for expansion beyond New England were announced in early 2005,with franchisees securing the rights to develop locations in New York, Pennyslvania, Virginia and Florida
The Challenge
Papa Gino’s explosive growth rate caused constraints on its existing IT infrastructure and prompted management to look for new technology solutions that will help consolidate their existing server infrastructure and provide a more efficient roadmap for deploying more resources to support rapid business growth. With only a small datecenter at its headquarters, Papa Gino’s had to contend with not only space issues, but the power and cooling of conventional rack mounted servers. Papa Gino’s learned that blade servers were the next generation of server technology that may help solve their problems, but do not have any experince or the in-depth knowledge to implement this technology.
The Solution
Papa Ginos’s turned to Insight, USA who partnered with StratusPointIT to help with the provisioning and implementation of IBM Blade Center system along with a mix of HS20 and then subsequently HS21 dual/quad-core blade servers as part of a highly anticipated business-intelligence application and server consolidation initiative. StratusPointIT successfully integrated a mixture of blade servers that served as application servers, clustered database servers, and SAN attached servers.
In order to fulfill the high availability requirement of Papa Gino’s, StratusPointIT brought online 2 active/passive clustered blade pairs utilizing Microsoft cluster services. The clusters serve as database servers running Microsoft SQl 2005 for Papa Gino’s mission critical application environment.
The Results
Papa Gino’s was able to realize the advantages of reduced floor space and 35% less energy consumption per server without sacrificing performance through the use IBM BladeCenter StratusPointIT was able to complete the full integration of the blade systems ahead of schedule and allowed Papa Gino’s to streamline its application deployment plans that were critical to business success.
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