Backed by technology from IBM (ibm.com) and IBM Premier Business Partner Vision Solutions (visionsolutions.com), Nicholas & Company has added new capabilities and improved the availability of its IT infrastructure, while protecting crucial company assets by installing a world-class backup and recovery system.

The Salt Lake City-based Nicholas & Company delivers food and other products to customers ranging from the smallest restaurants to the largest national fast-food chains throughout the western United States. The company, which has 500 employees, operates a 215,000 square foot facility and moves up to 600,000 cases of food every week.

The company selected the IBM BladeCenter H platform as an integral part of its business, consolidating 12 separate servers on to the platform. The integrated solution is designed for consolidation, virtualization and top performance. The food distributor is also deploying virtualization technology from VMware on IBM HS21 blade servers in the BladeCenter H.

"As an independently owned, mid-sized company, Nicholas & Company is focused on meeting the needs of our clients while operating efficiently," says Russell Erickson, Nicholas & Company system administrator. "We have been very happy with the built-in redundancy and energy-efficiency of the IBM BladeCenter H and expect continued success."

The company's new facility also uses an IBM System i 525 that provides storage for the BladeCenter system and runs the corporate website, intranet, extranet, the company's email system and a new voice over Internet protocol telephone system.

The project is one of the many in which IBM is helping clients develop a new enterprise data center, significantly improving IT efficiency and provides for rapid deployment of new IT services to support future business growth. IBM is helping clients move to new enterprise data centers by focusing on virtualization, green IT, service management and cloud computing.

Nicholas & Company also improved its business resiliency by migrating its tape-based systems to Vision Soultion's business recovery solution, iTERA HA.

Using a combination of IBM Power Systems, BladeCenter and iTERA HA for logical replication, Nicholas & Company has moved from an estimated recovery time measured in days to a continuously available environment.

The new application development can now perform in an isolated test environment on a backup server instead of on the production server.

There have been a handful of large-scaled data center announcements in recent weeks. On Monday, healthcare insurance firm Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama plans to build a $55 million data center in Birmingham's Oxmoor Valley region in Alabama.

Last week, the Bank of America announced it will spend approximately $90 million dollars to expand its Platte County facility, while Research in Motion purchased a tech facility in Plano, Texas for use as a data center for its Blackberry network.