Customer: All Electronics Corporation (www.allelectronics.com)
Location: Van Nuys, California
TigerLogic Product: Hot Backup System for D3 Windows 9.0
Parts and Assemblies Supplier Uses D3 Hot Backup for Disaster Recovery Solution to Save Time and Money
Since 1967, All Electronics Corporation has specialized in the world of surplus electronic and electro-mechanical parts and assemblies. All Electronics has catalogued a huge stock of pre-owned and new electronic parts from around the world. Several years ago, the company went through the process of replacing all their servers and installing backup recovery software on their main system to guard against failure and interruption of their mission critical business applications and inventory data.
"We were looking for a disaster recovery solution on our D3 Windows system," said Woolf Kanter, Vice President, All Electronics Corporation, "but found the solution at the time required that we stop D3 services to perform a mirror image of the system. This was not practical as we could not have gaps in our business day processing. Our only option was to do nightly system backups, knowing full well that in the case of a catastrophic failure we could lose up to a full day's work."
That's not just a hypothetical scenario; it actually happened as Kanter describes -- "A few years ago our building was struck by lightning and our D3 server was destroyed. We made a business decision at that time to attempt data recovery from the server's disk drive rather than to restore from the previous night's backup tape. This would prevent our losing a day of work and require every staff member to recreate everything they did that day including credit card transactions and more... a major headache. The data recovery was successful, but very expensive and time-consuming. We lost our system on a Thursday and were not back running live until the weekend."
Recently, TigerLogic approached All Electronics to beta test the latest major release of D3 Windows, version 9.0, which included the new Hot Backup functionality. TigerLogic was aware of the previous system crash and thought that All Electronics would be an ideal candidate to run live tests.
Kanter continued: "All Electronics has been using D3 since the late 1980's. We have several third-party software programs which our business depends on. The most important is our D3-based credit card processing program, which had some minor migration challenges from a prior release on different hardware. If we could ensure the credit card processing program would work with D3 Windows 9.0, we were willing to convert our entire production system. We set up a test server (which later became the secondary Hot Backup server) and installed D3 Windows 9.0 along with our credit card software application. The transition was flawless. D3 Windows 9.0 ran our application and the credit card program without any issues."
D3 Windows Hot Backup provides a complete and instantaneous replication of work on the secondary server. Files and information are transferred between the two servers continuously to provide instant copying of all work performed throughout the day.
"D3 Windows Hot Backup solves the problem of disaster recovery and system failure. If for some reason our main D3 Windows server goes down, we can immediately continue our business by switching over to the secondary server. And you know that little crash we had a few years ago? It turns out that the cost of the data recovery alone amounted to 80-90% of the price of the D3 Windows Hot Backup license. Add the cost of the emergency night and weekend consulting, and the D3 Windows Hot Backup system pays for itself," concluded Kanter.
