Australian Pharmaceutical Industries Selects Archiving From Vision Solutions

Headquartered in Irvine, CA, Vision Solutions, Inc., disaster recovery, and data management solutions provider in IBM Power Systems markets, announced Australian Pharmaceutical Industries Limited (API) selected Vision’s information archiving solution to meet its increasingly demanding supply chain and legal obligations thus ensuring high volume data storage environments run optimally.

"Vision’s technology enables API to meet specific data retention rules while cost-effectively reducing requirements for additional disk space," says Brett Hart, application manager, Finance & Business Reporting, Australian Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

As Australia’s largest pharmaceutical distributor, API processes data from pharmacists, agents, suppliers and customers 24 hours a day. Demand from its internal and external users, including customers and retailers, creates a constant and ever-increasing flow of new data. Generating nearly 30 Gigabytes on a weekly basis is great for business, but it can make data archiving unwieldy, time consuming and cumbersome.

Vision Solutions made it possible for API to reduce the overall disk space consumed by its database by 400 percent. "Without their technology, our database would now exceed 3.5 Terabytes," says Hart, adding that weekly archives have helped keep the day-to-day disk usage of the production library to around 1Tb.

"Vision Solutions’ Data Manager consistently demonstrates it is the best and most effective way to archive data on Lawson’s M3 platform," adds Vision’s Asia Pacific Vice President of Sales, Allan Campbell. "Overall maintenance of the environment and cost of ownership are significantly minimized."

Because this technology is an efficient, flexible, true modular, plug-and-play archiving system, API now saves hundreds of hours of program creation and testing. Minimal programming skills are required for updates, changes and upgrades. And maintenance activities are performed while users are online. The IT team also reduced day-to-day management to ‘minimum effort,’ which translates to considerable cost savings.

"Most importantly, we now control our data, rather than it controlling us. We’re confident that with Data Manager, we can continue to grow our business without suffering because of the data volumes that our success generates," Hart says.