In the U.S., one in eight Americans struggle with hunger. To respond to this hunger crisis, Feeding America was established in 1979 with the critical mission of eradicating hunger in the U.S. and providing food to people in need. With a network of 200 food banks, the national non-profit helps feed millions of citizens each year, including 12 million children and seven million seniors.
Feeding America is a highly efficient organisation that invests 98 percent of all donations directly into programs and services that reach people in need. As a result, before migrating to Rackspace, the organisation was in a cycle of buying and managing its own hardware every five to seven years. However, Feeding America soon realised the need to be more efficient with its IT spend and invest not only in high performing infrastructure, but also industry expertise. This need drove the non-profit to choose Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware to manage its environment. With this new solution, Feeding America has seen a 67 percent reduction in physical assets resulting in over $150,000 per year savings in IT expenditures.
“People depend on Feeding America for meals during times of uncertainty when facing hunger, so we must have the necessary infrastructure and operational expertise to guarantee food for people in need,” said Steven Carlberg, managing director of infrastructure and security at Feeding America. “With Rackspace there to manage our VMware environment with 24x7x365 Fanatical Support® and expertise, Feeding America can focus directly on its mission of eradicating hunger in the United States.”
Rackspace VMware experts assist Feeding America with its workloads for its food distribution database, which coordinates food collections at its food banks across the country from local donors, grocery stores and food producers. This database is essential at every process of distribution, including tracking the levels of food at each location, coordinating trucking routes for delivery and distribution to each food bank. In addition, in the event of a natural disaster, such as a fire or hurricane, Feeding America’s database coordinates food deliveries to people who have been affected by the crisis.
During the holidays, Feeding America experiences an increased demand on its databases, as food banks across the country host food drives and receive donations for families in need. In the fourth quarter of 2016, the Feeding America nationwide network of food banks helped source more than one billion meals for people in need, four percent more than the same period in 2015.
“As one of the leading technology platforms of choice for enterprises, VMware solutions can help improve the performance and efficiency of companies’ IT environments; however, it might be challenging to use to its full potential for companies that don’t have a wealth of VMware expertise in-house,” said Kaushik Balasubramanian, senior director of the VMware practice area at Rackspace. “With Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware, customers like Feeding America can leverage the power of VMware with the operational and technical expertise of hundreds of VMware-certified professionals (VCPs) available on demand 24x7x365 to manage and fine-tune their environment. With this peace of mind, Feeding America can focus its resources on distributing food to millions of Americans in need, while Rackspace helps power and manage the backend.”
Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware provides custom-built dedicated, single-tenant environments in which to run, migrate and extend on-premises workloads. With more than 10 years of experience hosting and managing VMware-powered infrastructure solutions, Rackspace is one of the largest VMware vCloud Air Network service providers in the world with tens of thousands of fully managed VMs. The company announced beta support for VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) technologies in August 2016 and was named Service Provider Partner of the Year in the 2015 Americas VMware Partner Innovation Awards for achievements in the partner ecosystem.
