Power > Case Studies > Services

The Data Transporter

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

A Simple Command

Once the decision was made to go with *noMAX garrison, Mears began the implementation, with the help of IT Solutions Group, in the third quarter of 2008. Within 30 days, the company was replicating its entire system and employee training was well under way, with IT personnel being brought up to speed on how the package worked and what to do in an emergency.

As Tod Heckerman, assistant vice president of IT, explains, “*noMAX garrison recognizes an unplanned system outage, switches the journaling, brings up the backup box as our production box, and then begins journaling on that box. When the core system is back up, replication then starts in the opposite direction. Anyone, technical or nontechnical, can initiate this process.”

Mears will begin running quarterly planned role swaps soon and expects that it will have no issues with syncing or rollovers. And according to Lenart, it will be simple to track any issues that might arise. Using the *noMAX garrison user interface, the company’s IT department can quickly determine if everything’s in a green, yellow or red state. If the interface indicates the system is in either of the latter states, users can drill down to determine which files might be out of sync. They can then force a sync to bring the two systems in line.

With a functioning high-availability solution in place, Mears decided to push things a bit. When bringing in its new Power Systems servers, the company used *noMAX garrison to transfer files and objects to the environment. It then turned one of the 520s into a production box and replicated again to the second 520, turning that into the new backup box. “Traditionally, you would have to do a save all and a restore all, which is a time-consuming process,” Heckerman says. “Using *noMAX garrison, we probably saved 16 hours.”

Tweet