Vision Solutions reports that feedback coming in from its larger customers using MIMIX HA is positive on two important fronts: it offers both cost savings and labor savings.
One of Vision Solutions' customers is a household name. Staples is the world's largest office products company, and it uses MIMIX HA for several different jobs, from facilitating backups to providing a disaster recovery (DR) solution. Staples and its IT team are realizing a significant return on their investment with MIMIX HA software, which runs on the company's System i servers.
"These past few months are one of the busiest times of year for us," says Jon Weigens, senior consultant, systems engineering/ops at Staples. "Before Thanksgiving, MIMIX HA helped us complete an important role swap and the execution was 100 percent clean with no fallout whatsoever. Vision Solutions is truly a strategic infrastructure software partner for Staples today, and the level of support we've received since rolling out MIMIX is world-class," says Weigens.
As the world's leading office products company, Staples operates more than 2,000 office supply superstores and also serves customers through its catalog, e-commerce, and contract businesses. It counts among its customers everything from home-based businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Staples' North American delivery business is run on two partitions on a System i Model 595 server. The North American retail business is run on three partitions on another Model 595. International operations are run in a partition on a Model 570 located in the U.S. These six partitions generate more than two billion journal transactions per day. Additional partitions on other System i servers support other strategic business units. In addition to the billions of daily transactions, customer service representatives regularly request many read-only query jobs from the systems.
Staples uses MIMIX HA to help guarantee uptime for the company's critical business operations. The software replicates five partitions (split across two System i servers) that run North American operations to another five partitions on a single backup System i. This backup server is located some 20 miles from the production servers. The partition supporting Staples' international operations, running on a System i server in the same location as the North American backup server, is replicated to a partition on another System i in the North American production location. Additional System i partitions are planned for MIMIX HA implementation later in 2008.
Overall, Staples tells Vision Solutions that MIMIX HA has helped it to:
- Enhance business continuity confidence.
- Avoid millions of dollars of lost sales by switching to backup servers during downtime events.
- Reduce high availability administration requirements to minutes a day.
- Avoid considerable disaster recovery costs.
- Defer system upgrades by offloading backup and read-only workload tasks to replica servers.
MIMIX HA also provides Staples with a disaster recovery (DR) solution that ensures much shorter recovery times and lower data loss risks than the company's previous DR solution. And, because DR is inherent in the product, it comes at no additional cost. "If you are looking for an overall business resiliency solution, you can't do better than MIMIX," adds Weigens.
"Our products provide unsurpassed reliability, affordability and ease-of-use," says Bob Johnson, Vision Solutions vice president of sales. "We help companies like Staples all over the world to keep their systems up and running. To enhance revenue and customer satisfaction, every organization-no matter their size-should consider increasing their business resiliency...especially within today's competitive marketplace," says Johnson.
About Vision Solutions
Vision Solutions, Inc. is a leading provider of high availability, disaster recovery and data management solutions for the IBM System i and System p markets. With a portfolio spanning innovative and trusted HA solutions from ORION, MIMIX and iTERA brands, Vision keeps critical businesses information continuously protected and available. Affordable and easy to use, Vision products help to ensure business continuity, increase productivity, reduce operating costs, and satisfy compliance requirements. Vision also offers advanced cluster management and systems management solutions, and support for i5/OS, Windows, and AIX operating environments. As IBM's largest high availability Premier Business Partner, Vision Solutions oversees a global network of business partners and services and support professionals to help our customers achieve their business goals. Privately held by Thoma Cressey Bravo, Inc., Vision Solutions is headquartered in Irvine, Calif., with offices worldwide. For more information visit http://www.visionsolutions.com or call 800-957-4511.
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