ZEN-NIPPON SHOKUHIN presides over the largest cooperative and voluntary chain in Japan counting some 1,800 shops comprising individual shops and small supermarkets. "Our company's mission is to maximize profits for our member stores," said Akira Onda, Corporate Senior Officer Deputy Director Division President of Information System Division at ZEN-NIPPON SHOKUHIN explaining the co-op's mission and IT initiatives. "We support the sales and profit improvement of our merchants through our proprietary information system that performs operations such as automatic ordering and one-to-one marketing utilizing POS data."
In 2005, the company totally overhauled from a mainframe to an open system and launched its first-generation IT platform. The amount of data has subsequently increased in keeping with their expanded scale of business.

"When mission-critical systems go down, not only are shops unable to place orders, but our entire company operations are halted," explained Hiromu Takagi from the Information System Division. "It is therefore vital that we are focused every day on ensuring that system failures do not occur."

ZEN-NIPPON SHOKUHIN also serves as a wholesale company conducting EDI among various manufacturers and affiliated stores in the chain, and the company had introduced a wide variety of applications to their systems, including mission-critical systems, to establish coordination across the systems of each company.

However, for ZEN-NIPPON SHOKUHIN most of the clustering products on the market did not support a mixed application environment. Furthermore, the clustering software introduced in the first-generation IT platform was a CUI (*2) based product. "When faults are detected, there was a need to look up and check the appropriate commands which created time lags until recovery," commented Takehiko Onuki working for Future Architect, Inc., supporting ZEN-NIPPON SHOKUHIN build its system architecture. "Thus, the second-generation IT platform required a product which came with intuitive GUI operations."

It was at this point that NEC's EXPRESSCLUSTER X caught the attention of both ZEN-NIPPON SHOKUHIN and Future Architect, Inc.

The deciding factors for adopting EXPRESSCLUSTER X included:

• Major package products already evaluated and verified with a robust delivery track record.
• The system can be operated by a web browser-based GUI.
• The products were the first on the market to offer proven Linux and Windows cross-platform support for cluster construction.

"In terms of operations, selected server vendor Hewlett Packard Japan (*3) was also in charge of EXPRESSCLUSTER X maintenance, and they had a very stable and smooth technical support system that coordinated well with NEC, which was another point in their favor," added Daisuke Iwahashi of Future Architect Inc.