“Our Maxava Partner was so co-operative and helpful that we felt they were more as part of our team than a service provider!” - Director IT, Mr. Barig Siraj

With over 1500 Users working from over 50 remote locations Zahid Tractor realised they needed a new and robust IBM i Disaster Recovery Solution. “Downtime of any kind is unacceptable to the business and would cause great damage to revenue and impact both customer and partner confidence” outlined Zahid IT Manager, Hussein A Tarhini.

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WHY SWAP FROM Assure MIMIX TO MAXAVA?

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In 2019 Zahid made the decision to upgrade their production and backup IBM i servers from Power 7 to Power 9. They discovered that their Disaster Recovery vendor Vision Solutions –part of Syncsort (Now named Precisely) would charge them a significant ‘upgrade fee’ to move to the new hardware. “We found out that Assure MIMIX would charge a separate license cost to transfer the software license to the new power 9 servers”. “We heard about Maxava from a friend working at a large IBM i customer firm in the Philippines who had also just swapped from Assure MIMIX to Maxava and we also saw that Assure MIMIX had a much higher latency gap than Maxava when updating the backup machine” said Mr Tarhini. “Our ERP system has a centralised system architecture so in order to ensure business continuity, we have implemented a local high availability set-up and a remote disaster recovery site using Maxava”. “Our primary machine is located in Jeddah and Maxava replicates all our transactions in real-time to our backup machine located almost 1000 kilometres away in Riyadh”. “Additionally, the Maxava solution allows us to perform all system backup activities on the DR side which greatly reduces downtime at our production site and increases availability for our users”

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THE IBM i SERVERS ARE CRITICAL TO ZAHID TRACTOR

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The Zahid family has been connected to commerce for over a century, playing a pivotal role in the development of Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure. In 1950 a chance meeting with Caterpillar led to a close-knit relationship, and since then Zahid has distributed Caterpillar machinery and equipment to the Kingdom’s private and public sectors. This partnership eventually led to the formation of Zahid Group’s flagship company, Zahid Tractor, by the late Sheikh Yousuf M. Zahid.

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Over the years, Zahid Tractor has evolved into two core divisions – Construction Machinery and Commercial Vehicles serving several industries, including construction and infrastructure, industrial, logistics and warehousing, agriculture, transportation, petroleum, mining, and quarry and aggregates.

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At Zahid Tractor, a commitment to excellence strongly influences daily actions and decisions. Guiding principles govern the operation of the company to constantly work towards their mission of providing excellence in customer solutions through a highly motivated workforce in partnership with leading global quality suppliers like Maxava. They are one of a few companies in the region that is ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified and they are serious about eliminating business downtime and data loss in their IT Operations.

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THE FIRST FULL ROLE-SWAP

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A few weeks after the initial implementation Zahid IT Management moved ahead with a planned full role-swap. They initiated the Maxava role-swap command and effortlessly swapped the 1500 users from the primary power 9 server to the backup server. Said Mr Tarhini, “The role-swap was very successful and increased our confidence that we had selected the right disaster recovery software partner” “Our Maxava Partner was so co-operative and helpful that we felt they were more as part of our team than a service provider!” said Director IT, Mr. Barig Siraj.

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“Assure MIMIX” is a registered trademark of Vision Solutions Inc.

“IBM” and “IBM i” are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation