Jerry’s Foods Turns to Scale Computing HE150

Scale Computing, Inc. announced Jerry’s Foods (Jerry’s Enterprises, Inc.), a national grocery store chain that includes Cub Foods, County Market, and Save-A-Lot, has implemented its HE150 in the HC3 Edge family, to power its IT infrastructure for in-store edge computing.

Post-implementation, Jerry’s Foods has reported improvements in secure DR, time spent on managing its IT infrastructure, and cost savings for its 50 national retail, grocery, liquor and hardware store locations. 

Founded in 1947 at Grandview Market in Edina, MN by Jerry Paulsen, Jerry’s Foods has a commitment to the customer and an history of excellence. For over 50 years, it has remained an integral part of their neighborhood, focused on being purposeful, family-focused and serving the smart shopper. It has 50 national retail, grocery, liquor and hardware store locations in the US within Minnesota and Florida. With customer service as its top priority, it was in need of a modern business solution capable of keeping pace with the advances in technology, while remaining performing, self-healing, simple to manage and able to scale for future demands. 

“With no IT staff on-site, and with potential downtime costing us varying amounts reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars, downtime is not an option for us,” explained Jeff Miller, director of IT, Jerry’s Foods. “I was blown away by the simplicity and functionality of Scale Computing HE150, which works extremely well. Our corporate and remote locations have a backup location that we can failover to, and within a minute, it can be turned on and brought up right away. It is safe to say I am sleeping better at night.” 

Before choosing Scale Computing, Jerry’s Foods was using a legacy virtualisation system for its IT infrastructure, which was found to be costly, unreliable, and difficult to operate and manage. It turned to HE150 for enterprise features that could be deployed quickly, managed locally and remotely, and provide self-healing technology to provide with almost instant failover and minimal downtime.

With Scale Computing, Jerry’s Foods has:

• Reduced its cost per instance by 50% over a 5-year time period, as compared to previous legacy virtualisation systems
• Rapid, trouble-free implementation and deployment
• Experienced an estimated 50% decrease on the time spent managing IT infrastructure
• Reported major improvements to its DVR security camera system rollout for its multi-grocery store location model, therefore creating a backup and redundancy solution where there was none in place before

With 5 full IT team members and no IT staff on-site at its many grocery store locations, the grocery store chain needed a solution that could be clustered for HA, managed remotely with ease, and have the computing power needed for on-site applications. After implementing HE150, it has reported maximum uptime and connectivity for business critical systems such as point of sales, electronic customer loyalty programs, and electronic benefit transfer (EBT). It also turned to Scale Computing for their backup strategy, leveraging the Scale Computing Data Protection Suite.

“High-performance, simplicity and reliability is of utmost importance for any organisation, especially an organisation like Jerry’s Foods, where downtime can both stop sales and damage the brand with their customers,” commented Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “With HE150, Jerry’s Foods now has an edge computing infrastructure that provides peace of mind for running on-site applications reliably, while still being easy to operate for a lean IT team.“

HE150 appliance is a small compute appliance that delivers the simplicity, efficiency and enterprise-ready virtualisation associated with HC3 platform. Built specifically for sites that need highly available infrastructure, it can be deployed almost anywhere, without requiring a rack or server closet. Taking up only the space needed to stack 3 smartphones, it also includes DR, HA clustering, rolling upgrades and integrated data protection.