When Sean McAnally, network manager at Captain D's Seafood, a Nashville, Tenn.-based restaurant chain, needed names of companies that could help him with custom servers for his ever-growing operation, he did what any tech-savvy person would do--he Googled it.
With more than 580 restaurants in 24 states, Captain D's employs a complex web of applications, including point-of-sale, drive-through and credit-card payment systems, as well as online commissary ordering, food-cost analysis and a Store Waste Attack Tool (SWAT) to help with cost efficiency. Captain D's also runs applications for customer satisfaction and training. All of these applications rely on central servers at Captain D's headquarters--making a high-performance, cost-effective database configuration vital to the restaurant's operations and success.
Captain D's had been relying on SCSI-based storage systems, but wanted to find a less expensive option that could provide the same performance and reliability.
"We needed to build several new database servers that were going to be hard-drive intensive," McAnally says.
Through McAnally's Google search early last year, he found out about ZT Group, a Secaucus, N.J.-based systems integrator focused on networking and storage solutions. Bear in mind, McAnally had called a few places from his Googling, but most couldn't talk the talk, or at least couldn't grasp the custom- server building that he was requesting. But ZT Group understood what McAnally was looking for--a more cost-effective Serial ATA (SATA) storage solution to run Captain D's high-performance applications--and like any smart solution provider, ZT Group did its homework about the seafood chain to find out more about the business.
