Johnston Group is a Canadian company specializing in group insurance and employee benefits solutions. Established in 1981, it provides a wide range of products and services tailored to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Canada. The company manages several brands, including Chambers of Commerce Group Insurance Plan, Maximum Benefit, and CINUP.
Situation
On a typical afternoon, employees in Johnston Group’s Winnipeg headquarters were preparing to go home when out of nowhere, smoke started pouring out of the company’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS). The fire department was called, and the building was evacuated. When first responders arrived, they discovered a cluster of industrial batteries that were just moments away from bursting into flames. Once the batteries were removed and the building was cleared of toxic fumes, employees were allowed to reenter the office. But even though the building was safe, employees were worried that a disruption to power could have resulted in catastrophic data losses, meaning that any data on the servers would be unavailable, and transactions and internal work would be unrecoverable. It could have been a disaster. But it wasn’t.
Robot HA to the Rescue
“Turning off the UPS cut the power to our server room,” says Ken Regier, Manager of Technical Services at Johnston Group. “Luckily, at that point, despite not actually having run any failover tests, we had Robot HA installed, and it was replicating to a secondary system at a local data center, which we were slowly moving our systems into.”
Robot HA is Power by Fortra’s flagship high-availability software solution designed for IBM i systems, ensuring business continuity through seamless data replication and disaster recovery. It provides real-time replication of data, applications, and system environments across any distance, minimizing downtime and maintaining operational integrity. The software's advanced features include self-healing capabilities and comprehensive auditing, ensuring that backup systems are always synchronized with the production environment. By enabling continuous data protection and immediate recovery in the event of a failure, Robot HA helps organizations maintain near-constant availability, ensuring that critical applications and processes run smoothly even during unexpected disruptions.
According to Regier, when the Johnston Group’s primary system went down, getting back up and running was just a matter of coordinating with Fortra’s highly responsive support team to determine what needed to be done to change the secondary system into the primary one.
Instead of our data being out of date and us having to do a full build of a new box, we were back up and running in less than two hours. Of course, our systems were down, and users couldn’t access anything for those two hours, but again, there was no data loss. It really saved us.
Ken Regier, Manager of Technical Services, Johnston Group
According to Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey, 54% of organizations rely on recovery from tape. However, this process can take days, resulting in a lengthy period of lost revenue that very few companies can afford to incur. Understanding the implications of losing data, Johnston Group leadership was very impressed with how quickly the organization was able to come back up. “That’s like losing at least a full day of business,” says Regier. “At the Johnston Group, we process insurance claims, and when we do, claim numbers get generated. In an event like this, without Robot HA, there’s no way to recover that generation. We would have had to start over. And then we would have had mismatched data between the systems because those claim numbers would no longer exist on the IBM i.”
The Robot HA Advantage
Fortra was the first place that Ken looked - and he hasn’t looked back. “For those out there that are looking at Robot HA, what you need to know is this: Outside of just being a great product, the support is phenomenal, and their response time is second to none. You connect with people who know and understand the product. You’re never going to have to go through three or four tiers of people until you get someone who can help you. The relationship that I’ve developed with the Fortra team has been tremendous.”
Keep Your Business Up and Running with Robot HA
The question is not if disasters, technical failures, and other disruptors will impact your systems but when. Do you have the right technology in place to ensure that no data is lost and downtime is minimized?
Let us show you how Robot HA can help you get a handle on IBM i high availability. Follow the link below, fill out the form, and we’ll find a time that fits your schedule to familiarize you with the software in under an hour. Our product experts would love to discuss what you’re looking for and show you what Robot HA can do for you.
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