(November 10, 2010)—Maxava, a provider of high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions for IBM i, announces that Jake's Finer Foods has implemented Maxava HA Enterprise to provide recovery of business-critical data in the event of a man-made or natural disaster.
Jake's Finer Foods is a full-line distributor that serves more than 1,500 food service companies and restaurants across the United States from its 180,000-square-foot warehouse in Houston. Hurricane Ike had the potential to bring the thriving business to its knees.
"Nobody tells our product story better than customers who use Maxava's products," Simon O'Sullivan, Maxava executive vice president, said in a press release. "Jake's Finer Foods was an efficient, well-prepared organization, but even with good planning in place, they realized when Hurricane Ike hit that it could still have put them out of business."
The severe hurricane caused $30 billion in damage across Louisiana, Texas, and the Florida Panhandle. Jake's facility was physically unharmed but lost power for 12 days. Although the company was able to use generator support to keep business operations going, the situation illustrated the company's lack of an adequate HA/disaster recovery (DR) system and provided the motivation for Jake's management to expedite the selection of a suitable solution.
Before the hurricane, Jake's was using a system that is unfortunately familiar to many companies. "It was called a wing and a prayer," Armand Page, vice president of operations and IT at Jake's, said in a Maxava press release. The company was religious about taking tapes off site. However, if the primary location were destroyed, Page recalled, "We'd have been out of luck. Hurricane Ike changed how we looked at disasters."
Page had been evaluating HA/DR systems for some time and had done many comparisons. In the end, he chose Maxava HA Enterprise for his company's needs. During the transition, Maxava's authorized solution partner Source Data Products (SDP) played a key role as well.
"SDP supplied local expertise on Maxava HA and the System i," said Page. SDP helped Jake's install the new IBM i 520 hardware as the source HA system while moving the IBM 9406-800 machine to the target HA environment, located in another building some distance away.
Within 90 days of signing the contract, Jake's acquired a new production IBM i, set up the replication environment, and started replicating everything live.
Maxava says its suite of HA solutions incorporates the features critical for any IBM i environment, regardless of size. The underlying architecture and engineering are the same whether a customer chooses Maxava HA Enterprise, Maxava HA SMB, or the basic replication product, Maxava HA Data Stream. Maxava also offers maxView Lite, which gives users of all sizes the power to monitor key IBM i system resources in realtime (available as free software from Maxava's website), and maxView Monitor, which adds the functionality to give users of Maxava HA Enterprise the ability to also easily check and report on HA readiness.
Maxava is showcasing its HA/DR solutions for the IBM i at Retalix Synergy 2010 this week in Dallas, where the company is featuring its full line of Maxava HA Enterprise, Maxava HA SMB, and Maxava HA Data Stream products.
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