“Anchor Glass Container Corporation is the third-largest manufacturer of glass containers in the United States.  We have eight strategically located facilities where we produce a diverse line of clear, amber, green, and other colored glass containers mainly for the food and beverage industry for jelly, tea, fruit drinks, and other beverages.  We deliver empty glass containers to our customers’ production lines to be filled.

“Our data processing is centrally managed for all eight manufacturing locations.  I manage all communications for the corporation, LAN and WAN, MPLS and FrameRelay, Win Servers, and PCs.  Downtime introduces the possibility of data entry errors, which can lead to incorrect orders, lost invoicing and receivables, delayed or lost deliveries, and unhappy customers.

Taking advantage of upgrade opportunity
“The company had just moved to a new location, but in a building where power is unreliable and where we are not the priority for the building owners.  What’s more, we are in an area of Tampa that is closed down when a hurricane heads in our direction.  We do not always have enough time to complete our server backups before the building power is shut down.

“We were running an older APC unit whose batteries needed replacing, but we also needed to increase our runtime.  So we used the company move as an opportunity for an upgrade to an InfraStruXure® on-demand architecture for power, rack, and air, with a NetBotz® monitoring solution.  The deciding factor in the purchase was that we knew we could trust APC from our history with the company.

“InfraStruXure and NetBotz are now protecting, cooling, and monitoring our IBM AS400, Win Servers, firewalls, and communications.  Our power is corrected and we have enough runtime to finish an emergency data backup.  With meteorologists calling for increasing hurricane activity, this will prove very beneficial over time.

“Our NetBotz monitoring gives us the peace of mind of having a complete monitoring picture and understanding of our data center environment.  In fact, because our NetBotz is sending us frequent temperature warnings, we are looking into adding a new cooling unit for the raised floor.  We currently have building cooling and a secondary unit, but it is obviously not doing all we need.

First-class customer service
“APC techs are always very helpful, even on the older systems, and are able to help isolate problems.  For example, they helped me reset our ten-year-old system without losing power, even though it was no longer under maintenance contract.  To me, that’s a sign of a company committed to helping us succeed.  And that’s why as our data center needs evolve, APC will be our first choice.”