Maxava

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When BorgWarner was looking at resiliency options to support their IBM i consolidation project the criteria included a product that delivered results and supported future expansion, without breaking the bank. The company selected Maxava to meet their needs for High Availability and Disaster Recovery for critical JDE applications running on the IBM i platform.

THE BUSINESS NEED
A worldwide leader of key technologies for engines and drivetrains, BorgWarner has proven expertise creating next-generation technologies for the automotive industry. With sales exceeding $4 billion in 2009, BorgWarner continues to expand on its roots in the powertrain product leadership that began more than a century ago.

The corporate focus on continual innovation and improvement filters to all areas of the organization, including the Information Technology groups. To support manufacturing operations and in particular, JD Edwards World and OneWorld software applications for manufacturing and financials, the IT department was actively looking for solutions to increase productivity while maintaining cost-effectiveness.  As part of this initiative, the Enterprise IT group decided to centralize support and access for JDE applications for seven processing locations worldwide. JD Edwards World and OneWorld users from India, Korea, Mexico, Canada and the United States would be consolidated to a single IBM i environment in the U.S., reducing the cost and complexity of managing multiple application environments.

Realizing the importance of redundancy for the newly consolidated environment, BorgWarner initially implemented an HA solution for the IBM i environment, however, experience with the new solution proved less than impressive. Daily management was cumbersome and did not provide the sense of confidence that the IT managers needed for the HA/DR solution. What’s more the prior vendor’s license model quickly became cost-ineffective for the growing number of applications planned for the newly consolidated IBM server.

A trip to the annual COMMON user’s conference gave BorgWarner a chance to see another solution for HA on the IBM i platform – Maxava HA. BorgWarner knew that dozens more consolidations were scheduled to occur and was also planning on the purchase of additional IBM Power Systems hardware to support high availability in the newly consolidated environment. As overall HA performance and cost considerations were evaluated it was clear that a new HA software solution would be the wisest choice.

THE VALUE OF MAXAVA HA
BorgWarner made the decision to move to Maxava HA for the HA/DR solution for the IBM i consolidated server and applications. “I am more confident with Maxava HA than I ever was with my prior HA solution” says Craig, IT Manager from BorgWarner.

According to Craig Parker “With the prior HA solution I wasn’t comfortable with the service provided. I still maintained full system backups and daily changed objects daily, but with Maxava HA I get much more verification that replication is occurring accurately and feel a lot more comfortable. It does a 100% better job and I was able to remove the daily backups from the production system.”

“The installation with Maxava has been great. The Maxava technical representative helped me optimize my Maxava HA environment as well as helped me improve HA-related items on the IBM i system. The expertise with Maxava and the IBM i environment has made the initial installation and configuration a breeze,” says Parker.

“Contingency planning is a competitive necessity. Since we have a centrally located system, we need to have the system up around the clock. If we lost a system and we did not have Maxava HA in place we would move to our hosting option, and in the “best-worst-case” scenario we’d be looking at a couple of days of downtime and the business would suffer considerably,” says Parker.

Moving to Maxava high availability software also provided additional benefits for the Enterprise IT department. “I saw a reduction in the CPU utilization after we moved to Maxava HA. At peak times we no longer hit above 90%, which we constantly did with our prior solution.  We aren’t maxing out any longer,” says Parker.

The time required for daily HA management also decreased significantly. “With the prior product I was spending about an hour daily managing the system. With Maxava HA it is very simple. I have a nice GUI that visually shows me in seconds how my HA system is running. With the GUI I can easily see any backlogs and research and resolve any issues,” Says Parker.

“Now I spend maybe five minutes a day with Maxava HA management. I’ve always felt like prior to this I was managing my HA. For the first time with Maxava I feel like the software is managing the HA system for me.”

BorgWarner is also seeing additional benefits such as increased production time on the primary server as daily system backups and regular systems maintenance move to the target HA server.

Craig Parker sums up his experience nicely. “The reason I came on board with Maxava HA was for better performance, cost-effectiveness and to support our future growth for the consolidated IBM i server. The idea that is harder to convey is the overall service experience as a customer. This was the easiest experience installing and transitioning to a new product that I have had.”

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