CCL Industries Inc.

While CCL Industries Inc. of Toronto, Canada may not be a household name, its products are familiar worldwide. CCL manufactures a wide range of consumer and industrial goods from hair and skin care products to cleaners and cooking sprays. In addition to its Custom Manufacturing Division, CCL’s Container, Plastic Packaging, and Label Divisions are leaders in their industry sectors.

CCL consolidated its five IBM System i servers first onto two and finally onto one Model 820. With a single server running the company’s JD Edwards World and SSA PRMS ERP applications for all of its North American facilities, CCL took a close look at avoiding downtime to eliminate related costs, inefficiencies, and potential threats to profitability.

More than 95 percent of any company’s downtime can result from planned activities such as database backups and hardware and software upgrades. CCL’s operations are spread across a number of time zones, so time “at night” to perform maintenance is much shorter than for single-location companies. In addition, there are no off-hours for CCL’s three-shift plants.

While hardware failure was a very unlikely scenario with the highly reliable IBM server, CCL needed to plan to protect its data and continue operations in the event of a power outage or natural disaster.

The CCL technical team led an extensive review process to evaluate their uptime and data protection options. A very favorable experience at a previous employer led Akhil Bhandari, CIO at CCL, to favor Assure MIMIX HA from Precisely, but to avoid biasing his technical team’s recommendation, he did not tell them about his preference until after they submitted their evaluation.