Customer Story
APL Limited
APL gained peace of mind achieving minimal downtime with Assure MIMIX HA
APL is a global business that operates 24×7 every day of the year. Consequently, the company tolerates no more than four hours of production system downtime per month.
APL runs its core business applications on Power Systems servers, which are very reliable, but reliability alone isn’t enough. Even the most reliable of systems requires periodic maintenance. In some cases, a single maintenance task can last longer than the acceptable monthly downtime.
APL needed an environment that allowed it to protect its critical data and applications and maintain exceptionally high availability, without putting an undue strain on business applications.
APL operates around the world and around the clock. Having applications offline for maintenance or any other reason is unacceptable at any time. In fact, users have been promised that there will be no more than four hours of downtime per month.
Although its core applications were running on IBM i-based Power Systems, one of the most reliable platforms in the world, APL needed to do more to meet its demanding availability requirements. Even the most reliable systems need to be shut down for regular maintenance, such as backing up data, reorganizing databases or upgrading the operating system. These necessary planned maintenance outages can be substantial. For example, an operating system upgrade can shut a system down for 30 hours or more.
APL performs nightly backups to tape, to ensure that its data will be available should a disaster strike. In a traditional environment, where backup jobs are run on the production machine, this can be a problem. Production applications often have to be stopped while the backup tapes are created. Even when a save-while-active technology is used, the high volume of system and disk resources consumed by backup jobs can slow production applications to an unacceptable level.
Results
- Minimal downtime
- Maintenance windows reduced to less than four hours per month
- Gained peace of mind
