As one of the best-known German coffee brands, the name Dallmayr stands for outstanding product and service quality and a tradition stretching back more than 300 years. And because excellent services today also require excellent IT, Dallmayr has had the IT service provider DATAGROUP at its side since 2020.
The company, which has its roots in Munich, operates worldwide and has transformed itself from a retailer of domestic and international specialties into a famous delicatessen with its own restaurant and event catering. Today, the coffee business and vending machine service are the largest business areas and make Dallmayr a respected partner in the retail, service and catering sectors.
Dallmayr takes a holistic and proactive approach to making the value chain from the coffee farms to the retail trade sustainable, conserving resources and reducing its ecological footprint. For example, Dallmayr and its subsidiary have been one of the first members of Fairtrade since 2010.
Focus on reliability
Dallmayr became aware of DATAGROUP back in 2018. At a specialist conference on IBM Power solutions, the company enquired about managed services for its own Power systems. At the time, these were still housed in the company's own data center in Munich. The subsequent visit to DATAGROUP convinced them with the full-service IT portfolio CORBOX as well as with the service concept and customer proximity, but a move to Frankfurt was postponed due to ongoing projects. However, when construction work around the Dallmayr company premises led to vibrations and disruption to the servers, the decision was made in 2020 not to wait any longer and to rely on the reliability of an external data center.
Performance analyses of the systems were first carried out in a proof of concept and the connection and data speed to the data center were tested. Once everything was satisfactory, the migration planning for the IT infrastructure began, consisting of two IBM Power i systems (production and backup system) with six partitions and a data capacity of 18 terabytes, an internal storage pool, data backup using LTO tape drives and cartridges and the Quick EDD high-availability software solution.
Data migration in partial steps
To ensure maximum security during the data transfer, Dallmayr decided to split the work steps over several weekends and redundant routes: "We sent two identical sets of data tapes to Frankfurt by courier on a Friday evening. In order to cushion unforeseeable delays on the road, we used two different routes and transported one set of tapes via Stuttgart and one via Nuremberg. The following day, the data was restored and tested at DATAGROUP's data center over the weekend so that work could continue productively on Monday," explains Peter Kammerl, Project Manager Business Applications at Dallmayr. Beforehand, the network was adapted on the systems so that the systems could be migrated in small steps.
After three weekends, the migration was successfully completed and the old systems were finally deleted by DATAGROUP. In an email to all those involved in the project, Peter Kammerl summarized with thanks: "The good cooperation of all those involved, the careful work and the time commitment led to a very good project result. There were no failures, data losses or critical impairments. The few faults were rectified within a very short time, and the causes were found and eliminated."
Today, six IBM Power partitions are operated from the Frankfurt data center in the DATAGROUP Power Cloud, mirrored with high availability using the BUS4i software solution, including for the headquarters in Munich, the branch office in Austria and the catering service in Braunschweig. In this way, fail-safe IT "made in Germany" is helping to ensure that the Dallmayr success story continues to be written.
