Vision Solutions Provides Protection for Puregold Price Club in the Philippines

Privately held by Thoma Cressey Bravo, Inc., Vision Solutions,Inc. the high availability and disaster recovery solutions provider in IBM Power Systems markets announced one of the Philippines’ largest companies within the wholesale and retail industry, Puregold Price Club Inc., implemented iTERA HA to deliver business continuity and IT resiliency across their advanced transportation, logistics and supply chain management operations.

With more than 600 employees in 23 locations, Puregold Price Club includes operations in Pampanga, Laguna, Cavite and Bulacan. A pioneer in the members-only supermarket experience, Puregold’s head office is in Manila with centralized back-end IT infrastructure facilities including its main production servers and software applications, which connects to all stores via a fully secured and integrated network.

A major concern for Puregold Price Club is ensuring 24/7 availability of its core merchandising application, JDA MMS. It is critical the application receives and distributes data across the network continuously and accurately. Puregold runs its JDA application on an IBM System i 550 server, the main production server which currently handles more than three terabytes of data. The company wanted to make sure that planned downtime on this server was minimized and that they would avoid any loss of data by having a back-up server ready to take over for the main server in case of an emergency.

"Before implementing iTERA HA , there was this danger of waking up one day to discover our system had crashed and we didn’t have a backup system," says Elbert Balcos, IT manager for Puregold. "It is critical for us to have a high availability application like iTERA running reliably and continuously." In establishing a ‘fool-proof’ disaster recovery plan and in anticipation of growing data processing requirements, the Company invested in a second IBM server (model 520). Next, Puregold evaluated numerous back-up and availability solutions that could handle an application as robust as JDA. They chose iTERA HA primarily because of its outstanding remote journaling features. Vision Solutions’ product provides fast and accurate replication along with reliable automation of the entire mirroring and management processes.

Additionally, iTERA HA provides:

• Continuous protection of data and transactions for all Puregold stores
• Fast replication of all transactions to the backup server
• Constant availability of its core application throughout the Puregold network of stores
• Minimum data loss in the event of any unplanned production server downtime

"Every transaction is recorded as a ‘journal entry’ by the main server and is then sent to the backup server using the remote journaling technology from IBM," explains Mr. Balcos. "iTERA HA fully integrates with these remote System i journals and updates the back-up server database in real-time. This amazing software solution reads these journals directly and updates everything end-to-end. We can even define the exact applications, objects or directories to replicate."

Once implemented, the learning curve for iTERA HA is very short. "You do not need to master IBM’s operating system to learn iTERA HA," added Mr. Balcos. "Since implementation we haven’t encountered any problems but it’s good to know we can contact technical support remotely if needed." Support is provided by Remax International with its Vision Solutions’ partner in the Philippines.

"We have the peace of mind that, in any event our main server goes down, the backup machine will be ready to take over automatically," Mr. Balcos concluded.

"We’re extremely pleased to work with Puregold Price Club," says Vision Solutions’ Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific, Mr. Allan Campbell. "Their IT team is using iTERA HA in innovative ways to ensure data resiliency and business continuity throughout their organization."