Clothing Retailer Taps CCSS for i/OS Monitoring

April 13, 2010 Alex Woodie

Express, a $1.8 billion chain of clothing stores across the U.S., has picked CCSS and its i/OS systems management software to monitor the availability of its System i server, the software company announced last week.

Express supports 550 stores and 20,000 employees with a single Model 570 server carved into two LPARs. All of its core back office applications are run off that server, making it a critical component of its livelihood and success.

“Our complete logistics, fulfillment and financial procedures depend on our iSeries availability,” says Andrew Bracken, IT operations manager for Express. “We could potentially lose millions should we incur a massive outage and every associate at the home office would be affected.”

To minimize the chance of that happening, Express purchased and implemented two CCSS products, QSystem Monitor (QSM) and QMessage Monitor (QMM). Together, the two products help to monitor and automate day-to-day activities, as well as find time for non-routine events.

For example, Express uses performance reports generated by the CCSS software to see how the server is running and whether any action is required. The QSM software “allows us to proactively monitor the system and prepare for necessary maintenance. It prevents reactivity,” Bracken says in a CCSS announcement.

Meanwhile, Express has integrated QMM with its job scheduler, the Control-M product from BMC Software, to monitor all batch jobs and provide quick notification to errors that occur during sequential processing. Without a quick notification, the errors would cause a cascade of missed jobs and delays that could negatively impact the company. “Without CCSS, Express would not be able to function cleanly and efficiently in our environment,” Bracken says.