Zen-Nippon Shokuhin Co., Ltd.

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As one of the largest supermarket chains in Japan, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin Co., Ltd. depends on its IT systems for everything from placing wholesale orders to distributing products to the company’s more than 1,800 member stores. In 2005, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin launched an internal project called Heart One to upgrade its IT systems. The project’s main IT goals were to minimize costs, improve performance, add flexibility for new functionality, and increase reliability to support nearly continuous uptime.

Zen-Nippon Shokuhin determined that its current mainframe-based system did not cost-effectively support all of Heart One’s goals: the mainframe’s reliability was a problem, and its hardware and software maintenance costs were too high. The current system also lacked the flexibility to easily add new functionality for real-time inventory control and sales analysis – features crucial to the Heart One project.

To address these challenges, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin decided to replace its mainframe system with Sun StorageTek storage systems and with Sun Fire servers in a clustered configuration. For core system software, the company chose the Solaris 10 Operating System and Solaris Cluster to provide high-availability clustering, and Sun StorageTek QFS to provide a fast, reliable file system.

Specifically, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin selected the Sun Fire E6900 server for the company’s most resource-demanding applications and databases. The Sun Fire T2000 was chosen for Web and application servers because it offers modest electricity and cooling requirements relative to its high performance. For its commercial distribution system, the company deployed an Oracle 10g relational database with Real Application Clusters, making it the first database in the Japanese distribution industry that runs on Solaris 10 and StorageTek QFS. The Sun StorageTek 9990 is used for disk storage, and the Sun StorageTek SL500 provides a backup tape library.

Testing of Heart One systems began in August 2006 with a test load of 1,000 simultaneous transactions. Data interchange functionality was switched over from the mainframe to Heart One in April 2007. The company's order-taking system is scheduled for switchover in the spring of 2008, and a variety of management functions will switch over in the summer. At that point, the mainframe system will be unnecessary.

Additionally, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin is considering replacing 2,000 PCs used in member stores and in the company's headquarters with Sun Ray virtual display clients. "Some of the PCs used in stores have occasionally been infected with viruses or worms," says Mr. Koichi Takeshima, General Manager, Information Systems Department, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin Co., Ltd. "We're thinking of switching to Sun Ray technology to improve security. There are also great benefits from an operations management point of view, as the Sun Ray devices can cut costs, and they rarely break down."

Overall, Zen-Nippon Shokuhin is very pleased with its Heart One solution, powered by Sun products and technologies. Mr. Takeshima concludes, "When we were looking at switching our legacy system to an open one from Sun, we did not want to just perform a migration; we wanted to optimize the operations of our entire organization, and that's what we're doing."