|
|
|
|
||
|
||
   
|
 |
Home >> Success Stories >> Tropicana Success Stories
FlashDisk Keeps Fruit Juices Flowing at Tropicana Organization Profile - www.tropicana.com Tropicana is to fruit juice as sun is to the orange, grapes, and pineapples that produce the drinks. Founded in 1947, Tropicana represents an Italian immigrant's dream of sharing the bounty of Florida's citrus trees with people living outside the state. Today, Anthony Rossi's vision extends far beyond the United States to Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. A division of PepsiCo since 1998, Tropicana is the world's leading producer and marketer of branded fruit juices. Without the smooth operation of Tropicana's Logistics facility in Jersey City, New Jersey, huge quantities of fruit juice wouldn't flow on schedule. Every day, a 40-car rail train loads between 250 to 300 trucks at this site. The Logistics facility moves 1.3 million cases per week through this facility. FlashDisk Customer Profile As Told By Tropicana “The Logistics' Information Systems (IS) department tracks the movement of juice, along with both running the automated warehouse and material system, and the business operation. Because the Logistics' IS department is so specialized, it falls out of the mainstream of shared services or information technology that the corporation has. We had to grow our IS department here with limited resources. For the past six years, Winchester's FlashDisk, along with its upgrades, has been the Logistics IS department's sole storage resource. It has allowed us to get the most for our money, and to retain our computer system and software longer than we had anticipated. The Logistics facility started out running its entire IS system on the Digital platform before StorageWorks. The Logistics IS system functions as a repository for moving pertinent data in and out rapidly. The designers provided for storing one week's worth of data so the system wouldn't have a huge amount of information. That worked very well for several years. We then were asked to extend the records on our system for three months. A Digital VAX had a large database spread across six disks. The database got slower and slower. One day everything ground to a halt as these transactions were happening. The disks couldn't handle the tasks. We could've added 100 disks and still not get the job done. That's when we knew we needed a storage device that could keep one step ahead of our performance requirements. After looking at the IS department's storage requirements, I evaluated Digital's version of StorageWorks, and EMC's Symmetrix. A favorable test drive in a trade magazine lead me to Winchester Systems and its FlashDisk, open system RAID storage device. The FlashDisk came up better on the price performance scale than the others. Going to the FlashDisks had a dramatic effect on the entire operation. Our bandwidth usage went way up to near max. With most hardware upgrades, you're always first going to have an I/O bottleneck and then a CPU bottleneck. However with the FlaskDisks, we could get two more years out of the Alpha CPU by removing the I/O bottleneck or at least moving it up to a higher level. That's the number one benefit we've gotten out of the FlashDisks. Of course, we even extended the life of the FlashDisks by way of three upgrades. The Alpha computers are attached to a 10BaseT to 100 Mbit Ethernet network via an ultra-wide SCSI interface. Each one of two Digital Alpha computers, which are running Open VMS, has a FlashDisk. The Alphas run Oracle RDB, Digital's database program, which Oracle bought from Digital. It's similar in design and philosophy to Oracle. On the other hand, it has tools that make working with the database easier. The FlashDisks have also prolonged the life of our software, which is highly tailored to our requirements. If you asked me eight years ago how long I'd be using the hardware and software I had at that time, I'd would have told you five or six years. This system is going on nine years. We will keep it as long as it meets the needs of our business and doesn't have any I/O bottlenecks.”
contact us | site map | privacy |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||
