You work where? FreshDirect

An e-comm taste-tester

As FreshDirect CTO, Miles Trachtenberg combines a love of technology with the joy of good food.

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The best part about being CTO at online grocer FreshDirect is "product development," says Myles Trachtenberg with a grin. "Product development - aka having taste treats every so often," he adds while handing a visitor a slice of apple-cranberry pie. Delicious as it is, the pie is still "under development."

FreshDirect doesn't kid around when it says, "It's all about the food." Sure, the company manufactures and distributes a wide variety of fresh foods to people in the New York metropolitan area who order the groceries online, but food is more than that to the company. It's in the DNA of the place, from the occasional barbecues in the street, to the ice-cream truck that keeps the manufacturing plant on its route, to the photos of pears, grapes and cheese that hang in the lobby of the administrative building.

Four-year-old FreshDirect isn't shy about its innovative approach to the age-old grocery business. The company's bright yellow manufacturing plant stands out from an industrial area of Long Island City like a ripe banana. A massive electronic billboard - the largest of its kind in the U.S. - juts from the rooftop and flashes 65-foot-high images of fresh produce at motorists approaching the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

The plant only shuts down a couple days of the year. Otherwise, the operation runs 24/7 - an IT infrastructure overhaul that Trachtenberg undertook last year makes sure of this.

A 15-year IT veteran, Trachtenberg joined FreshDirect in November 2003, charged with making sure that customers complete their orders at freshdirect.com. FreshDirect didn't want shoppers to become frustrated by long wait times or site outages and ditch online ordering in favor of walking down to their corner grocery stores.

Trachtenberg fulfilled that mission, bringing average response times to less than 1 second. He accomplished this while saving $1.2 million in software licenses, service and hardware costs.

Moving from a set of Sun Solaris servers to an Egenera BladeFrame made up of two-way server blades running Linux and VMware virtualization software helped Trachtenberg garner such savings. VMware lets FreshDirect create up to four virtual servers on each blade, with a total of 46 virtual servers today. These virtual servers are divided into two clusters - one supports the live Web site, and the other is "dormant." Site enhancements are implemented on the dormant side then phased over to the live side as new customers connect to the servers.

"We have a very dynamic business, where we've got new products, new prices, different promotions - and I never shut down the Web site," Trachtenberg says.

This represents a dramatic shift from the previous two-and-a-half years of the operation, where any changes to the site were done in a five-hour window - between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m - during which the IT department shut down the site, rebuilt the platform, validated it and got it back into production.