We are already starting to see the benefits of the new hardware. Our batch processes run up to four times faster, and daily backups take about 60 percent less time than before.
Andy Jobin
IT Manager
Business Impact
Outdated servers and storage threatened the resilience of Chandlers (Farm Equipment) Ltd’s mission critical systems. Meridian helped the company establish a hardware replication environment with IBM POWER8 servers and IBM Storwize V5000. With two synchronized data centers in place, Chandlers has mitigated the risk of outages while boosting performance.
The solution delivered by Meridian is already bearing fruit for Chandlers (Farm Equipment) Ltd. Performance has increased, improving response times for users, and helping the IT team run vital batch processes and backups in much smaller windows than before.
More importantly, the solution gives Chandlers a truly robust disaster recovery plan for the first time. In the event of a disaster, instead of having to restore its primary server from tape backups, it can simply fail over to its standby server and storage system. This means that the company has replaced a complex and risky recovery plan, which might have taken up to three days to complete, with an automated solution capable of restoring full availability in minutes. The new hardware comes with a free three-year maintenance contract, eliminating hardware maintenance costs over that period. Moreover, since the POWER8 servers are in a lower software licensing group than the old POWER5 servers, Chandlers has also reduced its software licensing costs.
We asked for proposals from a number of server and storage specialists, but only Meridian truly understood our challenge.
Andy Jobin
IT Manager
The Challenges
Chandlers (Farm Equipment) Ltd is a long-established retailer of all things agricultural. The company supplies farms across the United Kingdom with vehicles and equipment, horticultural tools, and animal care products. To ensure a steady customer experience both online and in-store, Chandlers needs a reliable and efficient IT infrastructure.
The technical team at Chandlers was already making plans to upgrade when a hardware glitch threatened to disrupt the business – putting a spotlight on the company’s disaster recovery plans.
How Meridian Helped
Chandlers (Farm Equipment) Ltd had worked with Meridian on several projects in the past and knew that its experienced consultants could be trusted to implement an effective solution.
To bolster disaster recovery and accelerate processing, Meridian proposed installing two new IBM POWER8 servers and two IBM Storwize V5000 storage systems and using hardware replication to keep the pairs of servers and storage systems in sync. This high availability environment would reinforce Chandlers’ mission-critical operations and dramatically simplify disaster recovery.
Recognizing the versatility of IBM Storwize, Chandlers also decided to migrate their none IBM Intel workloads from the HDS SAN onto the new V5000. This provided a consolidated, highly available, and easily manageable platform for both i and intel.
In subsequent phases of the project, the company will also migrate the data for its VMware environment onto the new Storwize storage systems, enabling the company to consolidate and rationalise its storage landscape, and reduce the hardware administration workload across its entire IT landscape.
