Customer Story
Raven Transport
Raven Transport trusted Assure iTERA HA to help with a critical system upgrade
Raven Transport is a growing company. Consequently, it needed to upgrade it’s IBM® Power 520 Model M25 server. At the same time the company wanted to upgrade the operating system from V5R3 on the old machine to V5R4 on the new server. Because it runs a lean IT department, the company needed some assistance in performing the migration quickly and seamlessly, with little or no downtime.
Being a mid-sized trucking company, Raven Transport has a small IT department that doesn’t include in-house programmers or hardware experts. As a result, the company needed help to perform the migration to its new server and operating system efficiently and effectively.
In addition, the company couldn’t afford significant downtime to accommodate the upgrade. Raven Transport runs a 24×7 dispatch center and its trucks are on the road all of the time. Therefore, the company needed to keep its server running throughout the project.
Raven Transport also needed the upgrade to be seamless. Given the limited IT staff available to “put out fires,” the company wanted to be able to install the new system, switch over to it and not have any serious problems that would have to be dealt with as a result of the migration.
In short, the company’s objective was to have the new system transparently assume the production role after the upgrade. Preferably, users would barely notice anything during the migration other than that their applications possibly ran faster when it was finished.
Before tackling its hardware and operating system upgrade, Raven Transport asked its IBM Business Partner, ICS, for suggestions on the best way to undertake the project, given the limited in-house hardware expertise. ICS recommended the use of Assure iTERA HA, which allows organizations to perform upgrades and migrations without interrupting business operations.
