Cooperative Elevator

"Cooperative Elevator Company had been using HA4i as their High Availability solution for more than a decade. Following the launch of Shield Advanced Solution’s AAG – Nagios Monitoring for IBM i and EM4i Monitoring Cooperative Elevator use all three solutions. Read how their team has become more pro-active and found peace of mind.
This article was published by IBM, within IBM i Customer Stories."

Keeping Farmers Working with IBM i

Cooperative Elevator Company is an agricultural cooperative based in Pigeon, Michigan. They are owned by their farmer members and primarily focus on receiving and processing agricultural commodities such as corn, wheat, and soybeans for these members. The company also has agronomy and petroleum divisions and a joint venture in North Dakota as well. In 2020, Cooperative acquired Scoular Company in Canada and renamed it to Western Harvest Bean, expanding their geographic footprint for edible beans. Sustainability is a key strategy for the company, and they focus on reducing their carbon footprint on every acre planted.

All business-critical applications for Cooperative Elevator Company are run on IBM i and Power, including receivables, tracking, sales data, and industry-specific workloads for agriculture such as commodity inventory systems. In-house developed software packages such as systems to track inbound deliveries and marketing of commodities are also running on the platform. The company has a second Power server running IBM i away from their main corporate location for business continuity. In the case of a catastrophic failure or bad weather event, the company can switch over to this backup environment to keep their business running.

As part of their business continuity planning, in 2012 Cooperative Elevator Company started to look at how they could implement a complete end-to-end HA and DR solution for their IBM i and Power environment to keep their operations up and running no matter what. They implemented HA4i for high availability, AAG for system monitoring, and EM4i for message monitoring on IBM i, all from IBM Business Partner Shield Advanced Solutions. HA4i provides a high-performance replication environment so business-critical applications can immediately switch over and run uninterrupted on their backup server in case of an unplanned outage. AAG monitors and tracks their Power servers for system health checks. EM4i will send the team alerts if there are any messages on their system that need attention or a response before they become more serious, proactively preventing issues before they occur.

Since implementing HA4i, AAG, and EM4i from Shield Advanced Solutions, the company has peace of mind knowing their operations and applications will keep running no matter what. This has become increasingly more important as Cooperative expands and becomes more geographically spread out. Every minute of downtime could cost thousands of dollars and lost productivity, which can now be avoided with Shield Advanced Solutions. CPU usage and hard drive space can also now be monitored, allowing teams to make corrections head of time instead of dealing with last-minute issues.

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K&J Trucking Inc.

"Keeping Food Supply Chains Moving is an IBM i Client Success story written by Brandon Pederson, IBM i and Power Product Marketing Manager, IBM Systems. K&J Trucking have been using Shield Advanced Solutions HA4i for their High Availability since 2010. More recently they have added AAG – Nagios Monitoring for IBM i to their mix of solutions. The Shield team provide support services overseeing their IBM i systems.""

Keeping Food Supply Chains Moving with IoT and IBM i

K&J Trucking was started by Dave Koch in 1979 with the goal of becoming a top refrigerated carrier in the industry. The company has been a family business from the start. K&J advocates for truckers’ rights and works with local and national legislators to find solutions to issues that impact the industry. They are driven by what is best for their drivers and employees rather than the bottom line. K&J Trucking operates 100 trucks in 48 states, focusing on temperature-controlled cargo like fresh meats and produce.

The company runs their entire business and trucking operations on IBM i and Power Systems S914. They have trusted the platform since the time of AS/400 and are always on the cutting edge, using new technologies to improve productivity for their staff and streamline operations for their drivers. Group 33 Consulting helps keep their IT environment running, assisting with software upgrades, hardware installations and more. K&J implemented HA4i from Shield Advanced Solutions in 2010 for high availability and disaster recovery to keep their business online and running, as well as navigation software from Trimble for their truck fleet. They also utilize enterprise content management from IBM i ISV Real Vision Software. According to their IT staff, they “never have to worry about their IBM i on Power Systems environment. It just runs.”

K&J utilizes IoT (Internet of Things) applications on IBM i to monitor and track their truck fleet and ensure cargo stays fresh and safe. Each trailer has a device and application from Orbcomm that monitors temperature of the cargo, reducing the costly risk of a shipment of fresh meat or produce going bad and having to be thrown away. If the cargo is getting too warm, the driver will be notified, and a correction can be made. This application is running on IBM i and Power Systems S914, and all trailer data is stored in their Db2 for i database.

Avesco AG

"Wagner AG, IBM Gold Business Partner in Switzerland and Avesco AG, Caterpillar dealer, work closely with Shield Advanced Solutions relying on HA4i for their High Availability to expand their business in the cloud. The client success story was written by Brandon Pederson, IBM i and Power Product Marketing Manager, IBM Systems and is published on IBM i Client Success Stories."

Expanding Business with IBM i in the Cloud

Avesco AG is the Swiss dealer of Caterpillar machinery and equipment. Originally founded in 1869 as a millwright by Jakob Ammann, the company was known for a very long time as Ulrich Ammann AG as part of what today is the Ammann Group. In 2001, the company was renamed to Avesco and is now acting as a legally independent company. Moving forward, reaching out for new markets and developing new ways to better serve its customers are core to their business.

Avesco has been growing their business with IBM i and Power Systems since the time of AS/400. Their dealership ERP system DBS (developed by Caterpillar) runs on IBM i. Avesco is also utilizing HA4i from IBM i ISV Shield Advanced Solutions for high availability and replication.

Avesco expanded to the Baltics in 2016 and took over the Caterpillar dealership in Finland in 2019. In order to be prepared for future workloads, Avesco has decided to transfer its applications to an IBM i private cloud, which is operated by the IBM Gold Business Partner WAGNER AG. The cloud solution also offers high availability, security and scalability. This partner assisted with the migration to ensure their business remained online and available during the move.

Avesco is well prepared for future business expansion thanks to the reliability and scalability of the IBM i cloud solution. They can quickly scale up compute resources in the cloud to support increasing workloads and data, and have the right platform for high availability and growth.

Staples

“In 2010 System I Network News featured a case study with Staples and Shield Advanced Solution’s Job Tracking software. The story still stands, the multibillion-dollar company continues to rely on JT4i in order to complete their role swaps for maintenance, for their high-volume complex environment. At the time of this article JT4i reduced Staples’ role swaps from 30 hours to seven minutes!”

JT4i helps Office Stationery Giant with their Commitment to ‘Easy’

Staples runs MIMIX for their High Availability solution. The MIMIX solution would protect Staples’ data and maintain its availability in the event of a server outage, but it couldn’t help with application recovery. To capture job tracking they needed something more dynamic. JT4i was the perfect answer.

“If you have an unplanned failure, you have to be able to recover as close to the point the system went down as possible,” says Jon Weigens, a systems engineer at Staples. “You can’t go back to the users and say, ‘Where were you in your transactions on your screen?’. To recover applications and jobs at the point of failure, Staples turned to a more dynamic solution – JT4i.

Staples and Shield worked together to formulate and improve the capabilities of JT4i (initially known as JobQGenie).
“We don’t just support Staples in this manner, we do it for all our customers,” says Chris Hird, director of Shield Advanced Solutions. “In the end, everything we improve for one customer improves it for the next. Nothing Staples asked for was specific to its environment; it simply made sense for us to make it available to everyone.”

The application development and testing process took time (nearly three years}. “We did thorough testing and uncovered a lot of things that needed work and [Shield] was incredibly responsive,” Weigens says. The effort paid off for both Staples and Shield Advanced Solutions. “Staples certainly pushes the envelope when it comes to job processing,” Hird says. “We now know that JT4i is ready for any challenge in any environment.”

With the combination of MIMIX data replication and JT4i, Staples says it has achieved a significantly more accurate recovery point objective (RPO) and a reduced recovery time objective (RTO) with the built-in tools. JT4i has solved Staples’ application recovery dilemma and facilitated role swaps at any point during the 24-hour production cycle, which otherwise would have been impossible.

IT staff has only to view the straightforward user interface to find out what jobs are in the job queue, what state they’re in, whether they’re active or have failed, and when they completed. “Under any conditions, JT4i helps makes sure our stores have stock and our warehouses have stock and are delivering,” Weigens says. “If necessary, we could recover at the transaction level.”

In a 28-day period on one system, JT4i tracked more than one million jobs. In just one hour it tracked command string, job environment parameters, job execution, and job completion of 31,000 jobs. Across Staples’ eight pairs of mirrored production systems, MIMIX processes in excess of three billion journal transactions a day. JT4i completes the application recovery solution, unobtrusively running in the background. The time it takes Staples to conduct a role swap has gone from 30 hours to seven minutes.

Weigens referenced a recent, particular role swap that he defines as both critical and highly visible. While Staples IT didn’t use JT4i to resubmit any jobs during the planned event, the company’s application teams did use the software to research and determine that no jobs were left behind nor had any jobs failed during the role swap. “The JT4i solution proved its worth,” Weigens says, “There have been money savings, too, but the business efficiencies and being able to serve the customer has been the biggest benefit,” Weigens adds. “What we need to do is provide everything we can to support the business function in an uninterrupted way with dependability, predictability, and consistency. “Anyone who has a high availability implementation and doesn’t have the ability to begin where they left off may claim to have an HA solution. The reality is that there may be a significant gap between being able to simply log on again and genuine business continuity.”