Simmons Canada Taps EVault for iSeries Backups

Published: March 21, 2006

by Richard Heitmann

Simmons Canada was one of the companies affected by the blackout that hit the East Coast on August 14, 2003, which put more than 40 million Americans and more than 10 million Canadians into the dark. After eight hours without power, the Mississauga, Ontario, mattress manufacturer declared a disaster, but it couldn't get access to its tapes due to gridlock in Toronto. That's when the company decided to re-think its use of tapes, and what eventually led the company to EVault.

Simmons Canada is the biggest manufacturer of mattresses and foundations in Canada. The company makes Beautyrest, BackCare, Beautysleep, Dreamscapes, and sang brand mattresses, and sells them to a broad range of customers, including national department store chains, specialty sleep stores, furniture-buying groups, independent furniture retailers, as well as to the health care and hospitality industries.

The company, which has $130 million (Canadian) in revenue, operates four divisions across Canada, in addition to its corporate headquarters in the Toronto metropolitan area. The company uses the J.D. Edwards World software, which is now owned by Oracle, running on an OS/400 server to manage many facets of its business.

Simmons was somewhat lucky during the 2003 blackout. After eight hours without power, the company's UPS system ran out of juice, which brought the OS/400 server down. Simmons declared a disaster and went to its hot site to begin the recovery process. However, it could not get its tapes from its tape storage vendor due to the gridlock affecting the Toronto area.

Fortunately, power was restored at the last minute, and Simmons no longer needed the tapes. But the ordeal taught Simmons a valuable lesson. "Off-site backup is of no value if you cannot get data back when you require it, so we terminated our contract with our provider," says Les Tomczak, Simmons IT manager.

Faster Backups

Today, Simmons uses EVault, which was the first vendor to offer an online backup and recovery service for iSeries servers when it launched its agent-based EVault iSeries technology in September 2004 (see "EVault Brings Online Backups to the iSeries").

EVault iSeries eliminates the need for tapes by sending highly compressed "snapshots" of iSeries data to an offsite data center, either run by the customer (if they license the EVault Infostage software) or run by EVault if the customer just opts for the EVault iSeries agent. When the user needs to recover its data, it can either be streamed over the network from the data center, or placed on a tape and shipped to a recovery center. EVault also has a partnership with one of the largest hot-site operators, for customers with a quick recovery time objective (RTO) and a need for a full-service business continuity plan.

Before EVault was used, Simmons' backup window, using IBM's Backup and Recovery Media Services (BRMS) and Magstar 3570 tapes, was 3.5 hours. "Following a server refresh, faster 3581 LTO tape drives cut the backup window down to an hour, but we still had to take systems off-line, which impacted production as we operate in four different time zones," Tomczak says.

Now with EVault iSeries, Simmons can perform "hot backups," which EVault says practically eliminates the need to taking systems off-line or having users log off. Simmons has more than 320GB worth of restorable data saved in EVault's systems, which takes up approximately 15GB in the vault.

The key to this hot backup capability is a new trigger method in EVault iSeries version 5.3, which was unveiled in February. As opposed to using OS/400's Checkpoint process to perform hot backups, EVault iSeries catches changes made between backups, and can take a 100 to 200GB snapshot in as little as 2 to 3 seconds, verses up to an hour with IBM Checkpoint process.

Simmons takes snapshots of its data using EVault iSeries every half-hour, which provides a good recovery point objective. "Some of our major customers have penalties for late deliveries, so it's important that in the event of a data loss, we can recover quickly," Tomczak says.

Richard Heitmann is senior director of product marketing at EVault. He can be reached at richard.heitmann@evault.com.