“There Was No Downtime.”
“Your IBM i expert Matt said your High Availability solution could replicate our Retalix system from our 9406-800 on V5R3 to our new POWER i with V5R4 without the need for a complete backup or downtime. This way, we just role-swapped production from the 9406-800 to the POWER i. There was no downtime. We saved 20 hours.”
Humble Beginnings to Thriving Business
Jake’s Finer Foods is a full-line distributor that serves more than 1,500 foodservice companies and restaurants from its 180,000-square-foot warehouse in Houston, Texas. In 2009, the family-owned company had $80 million in sales. That’s a long way from the company’s humble beginnings in 1946, when farmer Kevin E. Jacob came back from World War II and decided to distribute his farm’s eggs himself. The company has been growing every year since. These days, Jakes sells one million eggs weekly.
Armand Page was the project leader for the migration to the new server at Jake’s
The “No-Downtime” Migration – a REAL Solution, Not a Power Point
A traditional version upgrade or migration to a new server generally takes 15 to 25 hours. That is in addition to a complete system backup which can take up to 8 hours.
Because Jake’s planned to install their High Availability (HA) solution at the same time as the 9406-520 with V5R4, SDP recommended a “No-Downtime” migration.
“SDP’s Matt Staddler first explained to us that HA could replicate our Retalix system from our 9406-800 on V5R3 to our new 9406-520 with V5R4 without the need for a complete backup or downtime. This way, we just role swap production from the 9406-800 to the 9406-520. There’s no downtime. The only difference the users see is that everything suddenly runs faster,” Armand explains. “For example, a query that used to take 1-2 minutes completes in a second.”
Smooth Implementation – Even with the Unexpected
Armand and his staff were thrilled with the ease of implementation, and the results. During the transition, Armand says SDP was there every step of the way.
“Matt working with SDP was a guru not only about HA, but the iSeries and OS400, inside and out. I was really impressed with his knowledge, patience and overall good demeanor. He helped us through some tough spots. He is clearly one of the best IT support personnel I have had the pleasure to work with,” says Armand. “I was impressed because Matt worked hard for us – just like he was a Jake’s employee.”
Jose Briones, business process analyst at Jake’s, was relieved at Staddler’s knowledge and availability. “He had a solution for everything we were facing. To him, it was no big deal. One, two, three, it’s solved,” Jose says.
SDP helped Jake’s install the new IBM i520 hardware as the source HA system while moving the IBM 9406-800 machine to the target HA environment.
Some of the more important matters for Jake’s have involved the company’s Retalix software. “Matt just rolled up his sleeves and took it on,” Armand recalls. The staff at Jake’s finds Maxava documentation simple and helpful, but they tend to go to Staddler rather than dig into the documentation. “He’s always been right there to help make us self-sufficient quickly,” says Armand.
It took a total of 90 days before the company was up and replicating everything live.
“We were as green as we could be going in, and to have this quick a result is unimaginable,” says Armand.
Role Swaps Made Easy – in Less than 5 Minutes
“We do role swaps to make sure everything is working, every three months. The role swap runs in less than 5 minutes — just as modeled and projected by SDP. It’s very easy to do. We created scripts to do the bulk of it. It’s really nothing more than doing a role swap from the source machine,” says Armand.
Source Data Products, Inc. Delivers as Promised. We Couldn’t Be Happier.
“We could have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with another company and it may or may not have turned out well,” says Armand. “Source Data Products, Inc. delivered everything they said they would, with no loose ends. They made it simple – and powerful. We couldn’t be happier.”