Customer Story
Dupré Logistics
Dupré Logistics found a “surprisingly affordable” and trusted HA/DR solution in Assure iTERA HA
Customers depend on Dupré Logistics to move goods nationwide around the clock. System downtime for any reason including hurricanes is not tolerated by its customers. Because Dupré uses IBM i-based Power Systems servers, which are among the most dependable servers on the market, and because the company built power supply and other redundancies into its data center, its systems are close to 99.99 percent reliable.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t prevent planned downtime due to maintenance activities such as hardware and operating system upgrades. To protect its ability to serve customers 24/7 without exception, Dupré needs a way to virtually eliminate all downtime, planned and unplanned.
Dupré Logistics’ business never sleeps. That’s the plan. However, at one time, sticking to that plan occasionally proved to be difficult. Particularly since Dupré is located in “hurricane alley.” Dupré runs its core business applications on an IBM i-based Power Systems server, one of the most reliable business systems in the world. In addition, redundancies such as a backup power generator further reduce the risk of unplanned downtime. However, this alone would not have been enough to keep their business operating if a disaster knocked the entire data center offline.
Regular backups and a disaster recovery contract with Sungard helped Dupré to protect against permanent loss of application availability. In addition, all data, other than data applied since the last backup was created, was protected by these measures. However, about six years ago, Dupré decided this solution wasn’t adequate. Recovery times were too long to satisfy the customers’ need for 24/7 operations.
What’s more, disasters and system reliability were, by far, the least frequent of the company’s system availability issues. Most downtime resulted from planned maintenance. For example, a hardware or operating system upgrade could throw the company’s vital applications offline for several hours, or possibly more than a day. That was unacceptable.
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