Dupre Transport had a traditional disaster recovery (DR) plan with a 3rd party vendor. Their recovery window was 24+ hours. As they are a 24 x 7 x 365 logistics and transportation service provider with many Fortune 500 customers, management decided that a 24 hour disaster recovery window was not acceptable. The IT staff was given the mandate to evaluate and install a high availability (HA) solution.

Dupre Transport came to Genisys Group, whom they had a very long and successful relationship with, for help in choosing the right HA solution. For 17 years they came to Genisys Group for all of their IBM AS/400 acquisitions, as well as for guidance, expertise, and recommendations.

Genisys Group worked with Dupre and:

• Provided information on all four of the HA solutions available on the System i5
  
  
• Arranged conference calls, demonstrations, and vendor site visits
  
   
• Evaluated each of the products on four major points:

1. Underlying technology of the product
2. Impact on Dupre's hardware resources
3. Ease of implementation and ongoing management
4. Cost

iTera won hands down on each and every one of these criteria. Their solution represents the new generation of continuous availability taking advantage of IBM's Remote Journaling capability. It is extremely efficient and uses only a fraction of the system overhead (processor and disk I/O) as compared to the other HA software products. 

Implementation is done via the Web requiring zero downtime. Its built in automation of many features (monitoring, auditing, and paging) and intuitive design allow for significantly lower ongoing management time - 30 minutes per day compared to two to four hours per day needed form competitors' systems. Overall cost of the system – license, implementation, and ongoing maintenance and support - were 1/3 the cost of the other vendors.

The HA solution was comprised of both hardware and software. Being that the last 3 major AS/400 upgrades at Dupre had been successfully completed by the same Genisys engineer, Dupre was very comfortable and confident in implementing this project. This relationship was critical, as Dupre had no company staff at the new Hot Site location during the install and relied solely on Genisys Group during the entire installation.  

Genisys was able to help Dupre select the best solution for their needs by looking at price, performance, support, and ease of use. Dupre has benefited in several ways with this solution:

• Gained a strategic advantage over their competitors by now having almost zero downtime and interruption to business operations
  
  
• Eliminated operating system upgrades and other planned downtime
  
  
• Genisys' solution, iTera, has allowed Dupre's stockholders and customers to know that their systems are now protected in an HA environment
  
  
• iTera’s support group has also helped Dupre by providing support and showing them ways to improve and streamline data center processes