George Melhado & Company Finds Ease-Of-Use And Reliability With Backup Express

When you walk into a convenience store in the Northeastern part of the United States, chances are you're looking at goods provided by George Melhado & Company.

The company started life as a cigar shop in Boston in 1906, and has evolved into a 150-employee wholesale distribution operation, with a fleet of two dozen trucks and a territory that covers all of New England and New York, as well as some Midwestern states. "Next time you go to a convenience store, stand in the middle, and spin around," said Alan Wasserman, Director of Technology at George Melhado, "You are bound to see some of the products we distribute." These include cigars, cigarettes, tobacco accessories, health and beauty care items, candy, snacks, beverages, soft drinks, dairy goods, frozen foods, and seasonal items.

After several years with George Melhado, Wasserman has seen his fair share of technological changes at the workplace. Figuring rather prominently among these changes was the migration from a UNISYS mainframe -- which the company was using for the bulk of their data processing operations -- to a UNIX/Windows environment. Another important transition that Wasserman had to manage was the overhaul of the company's backup system. This was a customized solution that was simply not meeting the company's needs.

One of the first new backup products that Wasserman evaluated was Veritas: "I got an evaluation copy of NetBackup, and did the install, but found the jukebox interface hard to use. I concluded that if things were going to be this complicated, I'd better go with a different product."

Among the features that Wasserman was looking for in backup and recovery software were ease of use, the ability to back up data on a heterogeneous network, a centralized point of control, and above all — reliability. After conducting research on the Web, he found his solution in Backup Express, from Syncsort Incorporated in Woodcliff Lake, NJ, which he installed after a successful trial period. "I needed the facility to integrate the UNIX and Windows environments, and that's what Backup Express gave me," he said.

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