Model Data Center Delivers It All

Nicholas & Company is building a model data center that delivers significantly more computing power per watt. The Salt Lake City-based, 500 employee, food distributor has increased its computing capabilities while holding energy costs level by virtualizing applications, and consolidating its servers and storage on IBM systems.

With help from IBM (NYSE: IBM) and IBM Premier Business Partner Vision Solutions, Nicholas & Company has also added new capabilities and improved the availability of its information technology infrastructure, and helped protect vital company assets by installing a world-class backup and recovery system.

Nicholas & Company, which delivers food and other products to customers ranging from the smallest restaurants to the largest national fast-food chains throughout the western United States, operates a 24X7, 215,000 square foot facility and moves up to 600,000 cases of food every week.

The company chose the IBM BladeCenter® H platform as an integral part of its business, consolidating 12 separate servers on to the platform. IBM BladeCenter H is an integrated solution designed for consolidation, virtualization and top performance. To realize further efficiencies, Nicholas & Company is running virtualization technology from VMware on IBM HS21 blade servers in the BladeCenter H.