Vision Signs Filipino Retailer to HA Contract

Published: June 10, 2008

by Alex Woodie

Puregold Price Club, one of the largest retail companies in the Philippines, has installed Vision Solutions' iTERA HA software to provide data replication and failover capabilities for its System i-based logistics application, the software company announced yesterday.

Since it was established in Manila in 1998, Puregold Price Club has grown and now operates 23 stores near the Filipino capital and surrounding provinces. Supporting this growth are more than 600 employees and a robust IT system based on JDA Software's popular Merchandising Management System (MMS) application, which runs on a System i Model 550 at Puregold headquarters.

With business growing, the specter of an IT hiccup became increasingly disturbing for Elbert Balcos, Puregold's IT manager. "There was this danger of waking up one day to discover our system had crashed and we didn't have a backup system," he says.

That possibility led Puregold to Vision Solutions, the dominant provider of high availability solutions for the worldwide i OS (formerly i5/OS) market. Puregold selected iTERA HA, Vision's HA solution for small and mid size businesses, to replicate data from the production i550 to a secondary box, a newly purchased i520.

So far, Balcos has been impressed with iTERA HA, which uses IBM's remote journaling technology to replicate transactions. "Every transaction is recorded as a journal entry by the main server and is then sent to the backup server using the remote journaling technology from IBM," Balcos says. "You do not need to master IBM's operating system to learn iTERA HA."

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