FreshDirect Slashes TCO, Enhances Customer Experience and Propels Growth With Utility Computing Solutions from Egenera
Marlboro, Mass.—January 17, 2005—Egenera Inc, a leader in utility computing, today announced that FreshDirect has deployed the Egenera® BladeFrame® system to power its 24x7, revenue-generating datacenter operation. FreshDirect, the successful online fresh food and grocery company, now relies on the Egenera BladeFrame to run mission-critical applications, including its storefront Web site, BEA WebLogic Server, Oracle9i RAC, customer relationship management (CRM), delivery administration, payment processing and business intelligence. The high performance and scalability of the BladeFrame will enable FreshDirect, which expects to double its business volume over the next six months, to accommodate this tremendous growth.
"Given the heavy investment we'd made in our existing infrastructure, we didn't go down this path lightly. We spoke to analysts and customer references, and really did our homework. We discovered that while other vendors are putting legacy architectures into a bladed form factor, Egenera is taking an entirely new approach. Their BladeFrame system delivers a virtualized utility computing solution that is uniquely reliable and scalable, and requires virtually no human interaction," said Myles Trachtenberg, CTO at FreshDirect.
He continued, "Egenera has a roster of high-profile customers who bet their businesses on the BladeFrame and gained competitive advantage. We now count ourselves among those companies able to leapfrog competitors with Egenera's technology. Our senior management team and Board of Directors are thrilled with the results. Thanks to the Egenera BladeFrame, IT is no longer a business constraint."
FreshDirect evaluated several alternatives to its legacy RISC system, including blade servers from HP, IBM and Sun. The company selected the Egenera BladeFrame for its unique utility computing capabilities and Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, which combines purpose-built hardware and virtualization software. Immediate, quantifiable benefits that FreshDirect has achieved since deploying the Egenera BladeFrame include:
Lower Total Cost of Ownership: By replacing legacy servers with the BladeFrame, FreshDirect has saved $1.2 million this year. The performance of the Intel® XeonTM processors and chipsets running on the Egenera system means that one CPU does the work of four RISC chips, dramatically reducing software-license fees. Moreover, the company retired $200,000 in annual service fees. With Linux proven for mission-critical applications, FreshDirect is also reaping the cost advantages of open source. Overall, a three-year TCO study conducted by FreshDirect found the Egenera BladeFrame more cost-effective than any other system evaluated.
Better customer experience: Prior to deployment of the Egenera BladeFrame, checkout on the Web site averaged 14 seconds. Today, checkout averages just 1.5 seconds, even during peak traffic hours. Equally significant, according to Trachtenberg, applications can fail over with no impact on the customer's transaction or experience. These enhancements have led to increased customer conversion.
More efficient resource utilization: Since 99.98 percent of FreshDirect's customer orders are placed online, it is imperative to the business that the site is up and running at all times. Prior to installing the Egenera BladeFrame, the company employed a 1:1 high availability strategy, putting time, money and resources into hardware that was rarely used. With the Egenera BladeFrame, FreshDirect has allocated a single failover blade for all applications running on the system, dramatically reducing server count and improving overall utilization.
Scalability: While the legacy RISC systems buckled during peak traffic hours, the Egenera BladeFrame provides optimal performance with three times the traffic and still has the headroom to support FreshDirect's expansion goals.
Rapid upgrades: With the legacy systems, hardware replacements took up to two weeks; with the Egenera BladeFrame, a new server can be installed and configured in minutes. Likewise, software upgrades that used to take five hours and require a full system shutdown are now performed in less than 30 minutes on the fly with no customer impact. Significantly, the Egenera BladeFrame automatically updates both production and backup resources, minimizing system administration and ensuring that systems remain in synch.
"By combining a 300,000-square-foot production facility with a sophisticated IT infrastructure, FreshDirect offers customers better service, better quality and lower prices than competitive alternatives. That's a value proposition any business in any industry would envy," said Bob Dutkowsky, Egenera chairman, president and CEO. "It is absolutely essential that their datacenter be highly reliable and able to accommodate explosive growth. Egenera's utility computing solution is ideally suited for organizations that can't afford downtime and need rapid scalability. By virtualizing datacenter infrastructure and creating a pool of resources that can be dynamically allocated, the Egenera BladeFrame enables businesses to do more with less, and do it better."
Press Contacts
Nancy Keswani
Egenera, Inc.
508-858-2605
nkeswani@egenera.com
Gillian Farquhar
Greenough Communications
617-275-6514
gillian@greenoughcom.com
Founded in 1999, FreshDirect is one of the nation's leading online fresh food manufacturing and delivery services. FreshDirect is setting a new standard for fresh food production and distribution by offering unparalleled quality, product customization and value pricing from its state-of-the-art facility in Long Island City. Currently serving Manhattan and locations in Queens and Brooklyn, the Company is rapidly expanding delivery across New York City's five boroughs and beyond. The Company's mission is to revolutionize the way fresh food is sourced, processed and delivered direct to consumers. The company currently has over 200,000 customers and has fulfilled over 1,000,000 orders since opening for business in September 2002. Additional information can be found at www.freshdirect.com.
Egenera designs, markets and supports an enterprise-class datacenter computing platform, the Egenera BladeFrame system, which enables our customers to implement utility computing. This model, which we believe represents the next major transformation of the datacenter environment, enables users to dynamically allocate resources to applications on an as-needed basis. Today, BladeFrame platforms are installed at customers worldwide, including America Online, Cambridge Health Alliance, Credit Suisse First Boston, Emory Healthcare, FreshDirect, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, MChex, SAVVIS Communications, UFJ Group and others. Headquartered in Marlboro, Mass., Egenera has offices in or around Atlanta, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Kansas City, London, New York City, San Francisco, Shanghai, Tokyo and Washington D.C. For details, visit www.egenera.com, send email to info@egenera.com or call 508-858-2600.
Egenera, Egenera stylized logos and BladeFrame are trademarks or registered trademarks of Egenera, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Intel and Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. All other product names, service marks and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.
