Customer Story
PennEngineering
Assure iTERA HA enabled PennEngineering to drastically reduce maintenance downtime
PennEngineering operates around the world 24 hours a day. At certain times of the day the system is more heavily utilized than others, and system downtime is never cost-free. The company needed a way to dramatically reduce the length of its weekly system maintenance window, particularly as it expanded internationally and added more shifts.
PennEngineering operates facilities across the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia, but its computer systems are centralized at the company’s headquarters in Pennsylvania.
At one time, its U.S. factories ran primarily a single shift, allowing considerable time at night and on the weekends to perform necessary system maintenance.
However, operations in Europe and Asia dramatically reduced the times during which maintenance can be performed without impacting operations, particularly because the factories in China operate on Saturday and Sunday. In addition, maintenance windows are being further constrained by the U.S. west coast operations since a second shift has been added to keep up with demand.
Thus, the cost of downtime was growing, but PennEngineering’s systems still required regular maintenance. The company’s challenge was to find a way to dramatically decrease the amount of system downtime required for maintenance, thereby reducing the cost to the business.
The company also needed a more effective way to recover its data in the event of a disaster. Waiting for recovery from a tape restore was no longer an option.
PennEngineering chose Assure iTERA HA to overcome its data protection and downtime challenges. Assure iTERA HA captures all data additions and changes—including both user and system data—on PennEngineering’s production server in Pennsylvania and replicates them to a backup server located in about 50 miles away.
“Once Assure iTERA was replicating data and we conducted a virtual role swap my Director and I looked at each other and said, ‘we’re protected now’,” stated Adam Phillipps, Director of Technical Architecture. “We don’t have risk anymore.”
