Case Study: PFD Food Services achieves assurance, durability and 34% cost savings with Commvault

PFD Food Services drives assurance, durability and savings with modernised information management strategy

PFD Food Services is Australia’s largest privately owned fresh and frozen food distributor, with a national, 24/7 operation spanning more than 65 sites, 2,200 staff and A$1.5B turnover. Faced with the need to modernise its information infrastructure while keeping costs down, PFD required a resilient, low‑risk data management strategy that ensured high availability and business continuity and reduced the ongoing costs and management burden of tape backups.

Working with Venn IT, PFD moved to a Commvault data protection platform with NetApp arrays and Amazon S3 cloud storage, adding a secondary data centre for rapid failover. The solution automates snapshots and backups (incremental every 15 minutes, with 18 TB currently on S3), halved daily backup windows and eliminated tape handling, cutting tape‑related costs by 34%. The result is faster, more reliable recovery (validated to under an hour), reduced manual overhead and a scalable, durable architecture with further savings planned via Glacier cold storage.

PFD Food Services

Richard Cohen

Chief information officer