LF felt that Maxava HA has the best technical features available, and liked its ease of use.
CUSTOMER STORY
The Business Need
Leading supplier LF SpA has provided spare parts for the European commercial catering market since 1982. LF’s extensive catalogue covers parts for professional kitchens, laundry equipment, commercial refrigeration, coffee machines and bar and vending equipment and includes some of the most prestigious brands in the world. The head office is in Italy and there are 10 offices in Europe and America, with distributors worldwide.
Offering online B2B shopping as well as offline shopping for customers, LF has a highly integrated ERP system guaranteeing that all orders – online or offline – are handled through an automated warehouse management system. LF’s applications run on their IBM i to deliver their services seamlessly.
Competition in this business is fierce and LF’s customer service must remain exceptional to defend its leadership of the market, so the organization cannot afford any system downtime. If data loss occurred or if any of the applications became unavailable, LF’s customers could simply find another supplier to meet their requirements and provide the services they need promptly. Any event of data loss would be critical at any season or time of year.
L.F. S.p.A. has provided spare parts for the European commercial catering market since 1982. LF’s extensive catalogue covers parts for professional kitchens, laundry equipment, commercial refrigeration, coffee machines and bar and vending equipment and includes some of the most prestigious brands in the world.
Choosing the Right Solution
To prevent damaging data loss and uphold business continuity, LF chose Maxava HA SMB. LF felt that Maxava HA has the best technical features available, and liked its ease of use. Another crucial point in favor of Maxava HA is that it does not impact on the system’s performance.
“Maxava HA gives us the assurance that our systems are safe and our business will never stop, even in a disaster,” says Andrea Montalti, Systems Information Manager at LF. Montalti goes on to explain how the organization used to fear that in the case of a disaster, LF’s systems would be affected and simply stop. Due to its high system dependence, providing services to the customers would become impossible. However with Maxava HA and its sub-second replication, the company can now be confident that all their data is always safely backed up to their backup server.
In the event of a disaster, their backup machine can immediately take over, ensuring minimal downtime to the business. Not only does Maxava HA help reduce downtime for unplanned events, it also improves how the routine systems maintenance is managed. Less than 5 minutes is spent by the IT team every day to manage Maxava HA.
Maxava HA has an excellent role swap function and the simulated swap is performed by the IT team once a year just to keep the staff practised with this. LF says they have so far been lucky enough not to face any unforeseen disasters in the course of their business but they believe implementing Maxava HA gives them a firm assurance and sense of safety when it comes to business continuity.
LF is supported by WSS Italia, who is one of Maxava’s certified partners in Europe. Andrea Montalti says “There is a trust and transparency in the relationship between us and WSS Italia. We know that we can rely on them for any problems and have the most efficient response in return. Their helpdesk support is open 24 hours/7 days a week.”
Recommending Maxava
Maxava has comprehensive documentation available to support its product and services, and the technical support provided by Maxava’s excellent customer services team is exhaustive. “We like the usability of the solution, as well as the certainty of the result that Maxava HA delivers, that we can see from our role swap practices. We plan to continue to use and recommend Maxava,” says Montalti.