IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, February 2009 - 16

Kf9bei[ 8JHIDB:G/ Nippon Express USA =:69FJ6GI:GH/ New York 7JH>C:HH/ Freight forwarding, warehousing and distribution, supply-chain management, customs brokerage, cargo insurance, and moving service =6G9L6G:/ Two IBM iSeries 825s (soon to be updated to two new Power Systems 550s) HD;IL6G:/ CCSS QMessage Monitoring, QSystem Monitoring and QRemote Control; WebSphere MQ; Lotus Domino 8=6AA:C DC/ Deploying the CCSS monitoring tools to discover and share crucial system messages space worldwide.) Instead, it acts as a middleman of sorts, working with contracted companies to move freight for its customers. In some cases, it may bundle several customers’ freight to reduce prices. Nippon Express USA offers all of its customers important details, including tracking information, based on the data produced by its IBM i-based homegrown applications. This is reported via the company’s Web site, using data coming into WebSphere* MQ, EDI software or from many other more traditional means, such as telephone calls and manual data-entry updates. Data is often sent directly to customers’ systems as well. It’s critical that the company’s systems are up and running all of the time, except for the occasional routine maintenance. “Officially, our operations run Monday through Friday between 5 a.m. and 11 p.m. But we actually work seven days a week, and our systems have to be pretty much up and running during all hours,” Cree says. “Obviously, though, like any company’s IT department, we do have occasional maintenance issues to deal with, but those are sporadic and typically take place on Saturdays and Sundays.” Because of its availability demands, the company deployed Vision Solutions’ ORION high-availability solution. Using this tool, Nippon Express USA mirrors its production 825 to a backup 825 in real time. (These two systems and their 12 partitions are hosted but not managed at an IBM facility that also hosts and manages both of the company’s IBM System p* servers.) If the production IBM i server were to fail, Nippon Express USA’s IT department can failover to the backup box and be up and running again, according to Cree, in about 30 minutes. But Nippon Express USA decided it needed monitoring and reporting solutions to help avoid any failures that might force a switchover. This was because its previous systems monitoring had involved manual processes where IT administrators had to go out and look for any system-related messages. On one occasion, a disk drive had failed on what Cree characterizes as an unimportant test partition on the company’s high-availability box, but it took about 30 days for someone to find out about it and then have it replaced. Even though this wasn’t a critical failure, Nippon Express USA decided that any failure wasn’t an option. It also decided that manually checking message queues wasn’t the best way to avoid failures. Given that the company’s IT personnel are always working on new and innovative ways to support its customers, that time- and effort-intensive manual administration often fell by the wayside, with more pressing matters taking precedence. “Because we have so many partitions, it would take a while to log into each one to check on them. And we wouldn’t necessarily check each system each day,” Cree says. “So you might not know that a disk drive had failed for quite a while—or until it became critically important to have that drive and then find out that the system failed after another drive failure.” Additionally, because the company has to keep its systems up as much as possible to support its business and give its customers the capability to place bid requests and check on tracking information, its core applications have to be available around the clock. This is especially true given the company’s broad user community, which includes more than 72 warehouses and branch offices servicing some 50 or so cities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. As Cree points out, “Our customers need us to respond to everything. If we don’t, we face possible loss of business. We simply can’t afford to have anything catastrophic happen at any time.” 7j^aY^c\dcV;djcYVi^dc Although the ORION high-availability solution, which Cree says was deployed four or five years ago with the help of the IBM business partner Essex Technology, was a step in the right direction, Nippon Express USA felt it needed to build on that foundation to further its around-the-clock uptime goals. To that end, it began looking for automated system monitoring and messaging tools. Using these tools, the company’s IT department could focus on its core business rather than manually checking each system partition or application for error messages. This would reduce time and effort as well as alert administrators and programmers in a more timely and detailed manner to issues that could critically impact the business. Using a deliberate approach, Nippon Express USA began exploring possible solutions, speaking with several vendors and testing what they had to offer. Many of these tools, Cree says, “were typically green-screen based, weren’t geared 16 FEBRUARY 2009 ibmsystemsmag.com/ibmi

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IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - IBM i digital edition, February 2009

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