Customer Story
Puregold Price Club
Before implementing Assure iTERA HA, Puregold Price Club had no backup system and lived in fear of system failure
A major concern for Puregold Price Club is ensuring the 24/7 availability of its core merchandising application, JDA MMS, across its entire network of stores. The application is powered by a single production server. This production server already crunches more than three terabytes of data, and is expected to increase with the addition of more stores next year.
It is critical that this application receives and distributes data across the network continuously and accurately. Thus, the company needed a solution to constantly replicate data to a backup server so that they could be assured of fast recovery in the event of a crisis.
To maintain price competitiveness in a cutthroat local retail industry, Puregold thrives on its smooth relationship with suppliers, taking advantage of discounts that are then passed on to customers to ensure competitive pricing. The company’s core JDA MMS application covers all aspects of Puregold’s merchandising including buying, price changes and back orders with suppliers.
Elbert Balcos, Puregold’s IT manager, stressed: “We need JDA running every day, all the time; otherwise it would be difficult for us to operate with any business advantage. All aspects of our operations – from the moment an order to a supplier is placed, to the time it is delivered in the store and payment is made – all of it is controlled on JDA. So you can just imagine what would happen without it.”
Mr. Balcos recalled an incident that occurred before the Assure iTERA HA solution was put in place, where some stores experienced downtime during one weekend and were unable to encode data, resulting in millions of pesos in losses from potential discounts alone.
Puregold runs its JDA application on an IBM i 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.
In establishing a “fool-proof” disaster recovery plan, and in anticipation of growing data processing requirements, the company decided to invest in a second IBM i server.
