Coca-Cola Bottling Company United: High Availability
The
Coca-Cola Company is the largest manufacturer, distributor, and marketer of nonalcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups in the world. The Birmingham-based parent company, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. United Inc., is the third largest bottling operation of its kind in the nation.
Challenge
Coca-Cola Birmingham is a long-time IBM mid-range company, having used the products since the IBM System/36.
They needed to fulfill a Coke Corporate mandate to operate the company 24 x 7. While in 2002 Coke had installed what appeared to be the best high availability system on the iSeries market at the time, this product did not provide the capabilities Coke needed. Not only had the system never been able to perform a successful roll swap, Coke experienced serious performance issues that were attributed to this product.
Solution
The Genisys Group team had multiple meetings to determine the issues Coke was facing.
The Genisys Team analyzed their needs and recommended the iTera High Availability solution. They ran an iTera High Availability workshop, which immediately convinced Coke that this was the best solution. The Genisys Team arranged on-site meetings with iTera’s Vice President and the Coke IT team to review Coke’s specific Disaster Recovery/High Availability requirements.
The key to Coke’s decision to purchase iTera was that all critical programs, files, data, etc. would be replicated in real-time. Since objects stay in sync with iTera and latency is rare, switchover/failover are more reliable and simple-to-use.
Results
Coke made the decision to purchase iTera. Within three weeks of training and iTera installation, Coke Birmingham performed its first successful roll swap.
Coke has been extremely happy with the product performance and the unprecedented support from iTera and Genisys Group.
"The iTera team takes ownership of getting the customer up and running on their product quickly and efficiently. The Help Desk is excellent. As an example, July 4th Coke experienced a system problem. The Help Desk stayed on the phone all day with the Coke IT team to resolve the problem and ensure the systems were functioning properly."
"Genisys Group has always been there for us. They arranged the workshop that introduced us to iTera and ensured our expectations were met with the iTera product and services."
- Coca-Cola Bottling Company United