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The Data Transporter

Mears Transportation Group finds a road-worthy high-availability solution

A Level of Confidence

Before moving to *noMAX garrison, the company used another mirroring package on two IBM System i5* servers, a production 810 and a backup and recovery 820. Unfortunately, syncing the two systems was difficult, even with vendor support. The IT department was often on the phone with that provider—sometimes for up to 12 hours a week—attempting to get that package to work.

“Their support people were great, but nobody could tell us why we couldn’t keep the systems in sync. As a result, we could never do a true failover, even for testing purposes. And if we were to have a true disaster, we didn’t have any certain level of confidence that we would be able to recover,” Lenart says.

This created a huge hole in Mears’ disaster-recovery strategy, which already included an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system, redundant communications lines and a backup generator that could power one of the company’s entire buildings. Between the UPS and the generator, the company’s systems would be down for only 30 seconds—but without true and reliable mirroring, this was too little too late.

“We were backing up to tape several times a day, but with the number of transportation requests we conduct on a daily basis—some 10,000 to 15,000—being out of sync for even a couple of hours would result in 500 to 600 customers we wouldn’t be able to pick up,” Lenart says. “So, obviously, even with tape backups, our business would be hurt in the event of a disaster.”

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