Fortra Case Studies Amphenol's Migration to POWER9 and Implementation of Reliable Backup with Robot HA
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Amphenol's Migration to POWER9 and Implementation of Reliable Backup with Robot HA

Fortra
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
Aerospace
National Security & Defense
Quality Assurance
Construction Management
Time Sensitive Networking
Testing & Certification
Amphenol, a global manufacturer of connectors for the military and aerospace industries, faced a significant challenge when IBM announced it was ceasing support for the POWER7 production server that the company relied on. This coincided with Amphenol's need to improve its business continuity and disaster response infrastructure, following two instances of hurricanes and flooding at their New York data center. The company's recovery time and downtime were critical considerations, as the global user community depended on 24/7 uptime and information access. Previously, it would take the IBM i box two full days to recover from tape backups, a scenario that would be disastrous for the company. The challenge was to modernize the back end with new hardware and high availability.
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Amphenol is a global manufacturer of ruggedized, harsh environment connectors for the military and aerospace industries. Their connectors are used on every major platform in these industries, including commercial aircraft, military ground vehicles, soldier systems, and satellites. The company is part of the largest military and aerospace interconnect group in the world, with its largest division, Amphenol Aerospace, based in Sidney, New York. The company's global user community relies on 24/7 uptime and information access, making business continuity and disaster response a critical aspect of their operations.
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Amphenol decided to build a new data center in Mesa, Arizona, and transition to POWER9 servers. The plan involved establishing a new production server in the Sidney, New York office with full replication to a second server in Arizona. This required migrating data from the old POWER7 server to the new POWER9 server, performing a role swap, purchasing a CBU box from IBM, replicating side-by-side for a period of time, shipping the CBU box to the DR site in Mesa, and then establishing the Mesa server as the long-term failover option through daily replication. To achieve this, Amphenol used the Robot HA high availability solution for IBM i from Fortra. The solution was cost-effective and efficient, reducing the expected project time from 12-15 hours to just 10 minutes. The team also worked with Fortra to identify the user libraries and documents that needed daily replication.
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The implementation of Robot HA has brought significant operational benefits to Amphenol. The system ensures that all data and objects are in sync, providing peace of mind to the team. It has also opened up new possibilities, such as the creation of a sandbox for programmers to test on the DR box without affecting live data. The email functionality of Robot HA allows the team to receive logs several times a day, enabling them to monitor the system closely and ensure everything is running smoothly. The support from Fortra has also been a significant benefit, with the team always able to get an answer when needed, even in the middle of the night.
Reduced expected project time from 12-15 hours to just 10 minutes
Eliminated the previous recovery time of two full days
Enabled daily replication of 150 user libraries, 20 major IFS folders and directories, and 15 million documents
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