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Case Study: DataMirror's High Availability Suite

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Goodrich Corporation is one of the largest suppliers of components, systems, and services, serving the commercial, regional, business, and general aviation markets. With annual revenues of $4.2 billion, the company is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and employs over 18,000 people worldwide in 133 facilities across 20 countries. From aerostructures, avionics, and landing gear to engine components, sensors, and safety systems, Goodrich products are on almost every aircraft in the world.

The Goodrich Landing Gear Division manufactures and services complete landing gear systems for commercial, military, and business aircraft. Its customers include Boeing Commercial and Military, Lockheed-Martin, Airbus, Bombardier, Gulfstream, Agusta, Sikorsky, and the United States government.

Goodrich Landing Gear's commitment to leading-edge technology is exemplified not only by its production facilities that house some of the most advanced manufacturing machines available, but also by its information technology and software development investments.

The Challenge

Goodrich Landing Gear's computing environment consists of two IBM iSeries (AS/400) systems that reside in the Company's Oakville, Ontario location and are linked by a Fast Ethernet LAN. The company uses J.D. Edwards WorldSoftware for critical line-of-business enterprise resource planning functions. Goodrich Landing Gear's daily peak activity period occurs between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. In addition, seven million transactions are generated during its prescheduled nightly batch jobs. The company experienced a significant increase in its daily transaction volume with the implementation of a new Labor Data Collection application in November 2001.

With its high volume of transactions and commitment to providing 24x7 service, Goodrich Landing Gear realized that it would experience a significant disruption in the event of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) server failure. Business transactions would grind to a halt. In addition, the company could not adequately meet 24x7 availability requirements by continuing to lock its database in order to run tape backups on its production iSeries server. The company also wanted to segregate its production and development environments for workload balancing, needed a more efficient application development and testing, and required greater control over new object promotion from test to production environments.

Goodrich Landing Gear needed to ensure that in the event that its production iSeries server experienced an outage, the backup and recovery server would be able to automatically take over operations and that the high availability solution selected would be compliant with corporate Disaster Recovery (DR) recommendations.

The Solution

Precipitated by the need for a more responsive solution, Goodrich Landing Gear began to search for a robust high availability solution to support its DR plan. Through a referral from a hardware vendor business partner, Able-One Systems Inc., Goodrich decided to implement DataMirror High Availability Suite in April 2001.

"The DataMirror solution had the right balance between price and performance, offering advanced technology together with ease of setup and use," cites Ilija Drakulic, Senior Programmer Analyst, Goodrich Landing Gear.

DataMirror High Availability Suite is a single integrated data resiliency software solution that captures iSeries objects and database transactions from primary systems and mirrors them in real-time to one or more backup iSeries systems. The solution can detect primary system failure and invoke high-speed switching to enable continuous business operations and rapid recovery from downtime.

The Benefits

Since the implementation of DataMirror High Availability Suite, Goodrich Landing Gear has experienced numerous business benefits:

  • Full operational switchover in less than fifteen minutes

  • Compliance with corporate DR policies and best practices
  • 24x7 availability of the production iSeries environment
  • Continuous access to J.D. Edwards applications, benefiting 320 internal users
  • More efficient workload balancing, which optimizes resource utilization and enables the production server to be dedicated solely to live operations that drive business
  • Enhanced control over new objects promotion into production environment
  • Empowerment of suppliers such as Aerovnatix users to access data from the recovery system, reducing the security exposure of the production system
     

Drakulic states, "High Availability Suite provides us with a quick and reliable solution that supports our critical disaster recovery and development initiatives. The solution is easy to configure and provides high reliability with low maintenance costs, affording us a maximum return on a minimal software investment. It's also reassuring that High Availability Suite is backed by DataMirror's proven high availability implementation methodology, providing us with smooth knowledge transfer for self-sufficiency and the long-term viability of the solution.”

Conclusion

Now that its high availability requirements have been met, Goodrich Landing Gear is looking to extend the use of DataMirror software with the creation of production data snapshots for reporting and data mining. The company is also considering DataMirror's real-time data integration solution, Transformation Server, for consolidated reporting and data conversion purposes.

Drakulic comments, "We anticipate our computing environment and transaction volumes will grow with the planned implementation of a common ERP system across the division by the end of 2005, and we expect the scale of our high availability requirements to follow suit. We are confident in the ability of DataMirror High Availability Suite to meet our current and future needs. In fact, we are evaluating extending the solution to support continuous access to our stream file servers and different platforms, applications, and databases."

Drakulic finishes, "From sealing systems on the Alaskan pipeline to landing gear on the Space Shuttle and star tracker systems for satellites, our goal is to meet or exceed customer expectations regardless of the challenge. DataMirror High Availability Suite provides a data transport vehicle which enables our application development team to define and implement a robust application development methodology."


Ilija Drakulic is Senior Programmer Analyst at Goodrich Landing Gear. Ilija is responsible for ensuring the continuous operations of Goodrich’s ERP system and the critical business processes that are supported by the system.



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DataMirror
3100 Steeles Avenue East
Suite 1100
Markham, Ontario
L3R 8T3
Canada
Tel: 800-362-5955 or 905-415-0310
Web: www.datamirror.com
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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