Maxava, a global leader in IBM i high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) software for both on-premise and cloud environments, has received acclaim from UK industrial supply company Smith Brothers Stores for providing a product and service exceeding their high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) expectations.

After a power substation near their Leicester location went out of commission causing a severe power failure, it become apparent to Smith Brothers Stores that their current tape based solution which required travel to an off-site location 40 miles from their primary server, was not suitable for their DR requirements. Peter Hulcoop, IT Manager says, “It was important for us to be able to use the back-up machine without a day’s lapse in availability. The key to recovery is speed and we needed to find a HA solution that was more feasible for a company of this size.”

Maxava HA’s unique software based approach to DR for IBM i allows users to remotely access an off-site back-up system. Users can then perform a Role Swap delivering the ability to switch their on-going business from a primary system to a dedicated off-site location in the event of an emergency, all within a matter of minutes. This allows for maintenance and recovery procedures to commence without interrupting day-to-day operations, a procedure which was not possible with Smith Brothers Stores previous tape based solution.

Two weeks after going live with Maxava HA Enterprise⁺, Smith Brothers Stores required maintenance on the production system. What should have been a one day task resulted in a three week ordeal. “Without Maxava we would have been in dire straits, there’s no two ways about it. It would have meant a minimum of two to three days of downtime to our business without Maxava HA,” says Peter Hulcoop. He then added, “Machines simply go down when you don’t want them to and this event happened at the end of the day, the worst possible time for us.”

With assistance from the Maxava support team, Smith Brothers Stores successfully ran for three weeks on their back-up system while the maintenance procedures took place. The

Maxava support team were able to plan a controlled Role Swap back once the maintenance was complete, returning daily operations to business-as-usual. Peter notes, “If we were down for any length of time it would dramatically impact our revenues. We could deliver a physical product but we could not produce invoices, which when dealing with hundreds of thousands of pounds per order… well, you get the picture.”

In addition to successfully saving the business from a substantial loss of revenue, the team is able to monitor their systems remotely with the added flexibility of maxView Manager, an application for iPhone and Android. There is minimal action required to run the application and additionally it provides the IT support staff with a piece of mind.

Peter Hulcoop and Smith Brothers Stores are ultimately thrilled with the addition of Maxava HA to their IT infrastructure. “Thank goodness we bought Maxava when we did,” Peter says. “Given the circumstances, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief when it worked successfully at a critical moment for us”

You can download the Smith Brothers Stores case study here.