Case Study: Bradshaw International achieves business continuity and high availability with Zumasys

Cooking Up Business Continuity

Bradshaw International, a leading housewares distributor that ships more than 150 million units annually, faced significant business-risk from running 30+ physical servers supporting mission‑critical systems like its warehouse management system. Bradshaw engaged Zumasys to rethink virtualization and design a high‑availability, business‑continuity solution using NetApp MetroCluster, Cisco networking and Zumasys professional services to protect operations and reduce dependency on tape backups and single‑site infrastructure.

Zumasys implemented a two‑site NetApp MetroCluster with six active‑active servers, replication to a NetApp FAS2240 at the SuperNAP data center, and VMware-based recovery and motion tools; the project finished within 90 days and under budget. As a result, Bradshaw cut server deployment time from five days to 30 minutes, removed the risk of prolonged downtime with an active failover site, enabled non‑disruptive maintenance, reduced capital needs for new servers, and laid the groundwork for hybrid cloud and virtual desktops.

Bradshaw International

Brian Foster

Vice President of Information Technology