Guilbault Group installs high availability solution to ensure the business runs at all times and eliminates planned and unplanned downtime costs.

Overview

Business Need/Challenge

• System availability 24/7
• Eliminate the potential for severe monetary penalties if production machine fails
• Eliminate downtime needed to maintain production machine

Solution

• System i for production and System i for HA
• QuickEDD High Availability software

Key Benefits

• 24/7 availability of critical business applications
• Ability to fail-over and run production off HA machine within 15 minutes
• No interruptions in business for scheduled maintenance

Guilbault Group has been paving the way in Canadian transportation for over three generations now. Founded in 1929, this innovative trucking company serves the Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Provinces, as well as the Eastern USA markets with a fleet of over 1500 trucks.

Whereas much of the transportation industry has been severely struggling over the last couple of years due to high oil costs, labour shortages and stricter regulations, Guilbault Group has continued to grow. They credit this growth to their continuous focus on service, reliability and the use of innovative technologies.

One of the ways in which they applied their forward thinking attitude on technology was to look into implementing complete redundancy of their systems. Although they had never had any issues before, they understood the threat of any unplanned downtime.

Driver delays a costly affair

They had several concerns. First of all, as their trucks are continuously crossing the border to and from our neighbors to the south, manifests must be sent ahead to the customs agents. If a truck arrives without a manifest, there is a signi- ficant fine incurred and entry could possibly be delayed. Any stop of the systems that create these manifests would results in a high productivity loss as well as a large potential in revenue lost.

Additionally, their trucks are running 24/7 in Canada and the United States so there was little room for backup. All merchandise pickup calls were entered in to the system. All eight warehouses in Canada were equipped with bar code readers which allowed them to know, at all times, the location of merchandise. As well, the location of all their trucks (more than 1600) was also recorded in the system, in order to keep clients informed with up to date information.

Therefore, any delays resulted in loss revenue and possible fines. The process in the past was once a week between Saturday night and Sunday morning, a backup was done but if there were any delays or issues, then transportation was postponed. With competition fierce, they needed to keep their service levels up and ensure that their trucks were available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.

So instead of waiting for an incident to occur, they decided to take a proactive approach. It was at this time that Guilbault Group brought Present, an IBM Premier business partner, onboard to perform a recovery plan analysis on their current systems. “We’ve been working with Present for over 5 years now and see them as our trusted advisors in helping us to use technology as a competitive advantage”, stated Mr. Jean Rodrigue, IT Manager at Guilbault Group. “We knew we had to have redundancy in our systems but thought the cost was going to be a roadblock. They helped us find the right solution for us that met our budget.”

System i + QuickEDD = a solid business solution

To meet their current needs, Present recommended to upgrade their production machine and purchase a new System i for HA as well as install a new software product on the Canadian market, Trader’s QuickEDD for data replication.

Having been an IBM client for over 25 years and using their Power system, System x and Domino technology to run their business, Guilbault Group was already sold on the robustness and reliability of the System i but they had never heard of the high availability software QuickEDD.

Traders, founded in 1992 and headquartered in France, created QuickEDD around the concept of simple and performing products. QuickEDD is now installed in over 1050 companies throughout the world.

The overall success of QuickEDD and the reason why Guilbault Group was sold on it following an initial 1 hour demo is the ease of use and sophistication of the software. “QuickEDD is simple and quick to install, easy to maintain and uses very little of the system resources”, Mr. Rodrigue affirms. “I was impressed with QuickEDD. Simply put, QuickEDD software is simple. We choose this product because it is built around an automated process that allows the implementation to be quick and that eliminates daily human intervention. And not to mention it is affordable.”

The installation took 7 days, from initial planning to a complete roll swap. The first milestone was a complete transfer of data from the production machine to the HA machine. After a couple of adjustments, the failover back to the production machine was done the next morning. The total time to switch back over was 15 minutes.

About a month after the installation took place; there was a problem with the production machine due to a defective card. Guilbault Group was able to activate the backup system seamlessly to allow users to continue working, and then switch back to the production machine when the problem was repaired.