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BOOSTING PERFORMANCE OF IBM WORKLOADS

As a leading company in the heavy vehicle industry, our client carefully monitors risks that can affect its reputation and overall business performance.

The company thrives in a fiercely competitive sector, but growth depends on its vehicles moving into the market efficiently via a network of dealers.

It needed to ensure high levels of availability and user productivity for its CRM, warehouse and dealer management systems.

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Reported cyber security was their top priority in the HelpSystems AIX Community Survey 2020

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Over a third of users are concerned about a growing shortage of AIX skills

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AIX users planning to move all their applications to another platform within two years

manufacturing

challenge

The company operates its core applications on IBM Power Systems running AIX.

This environment is the focus of monitoring and management – including investigating and remotely assisting the resolution of incidents arising from day-to-day operations, or configuration of the IBM infrastructure.

In order to keep the dealer system running at peak performance, the client needed additional monitoring of disk and CPU capacity, backup success and network connectivity – plus patching and other system changes.

The company’s disaster recovery system is hosted in a third party data center.

Monitoring the DR services provided is an important part of the total management service.

SOLUTION

Before designing the solution, Tectrade carried out an assessment of the entire IBM environment and the client accepted a recommendation that other line of business applications that were running on IBM i systems would benefit from the same level of monitoring and management as the AIX workloads.

Tectrade implemented a comprehensive set of services for all IBM host systems and LPARs.

Tectrade’s Network Operations Center provides 24/7 monitoring for:

  • completion of backups – and notifies the client if failed
  • real-time performance events
  • hardware and communication link failures and errors
  • disk and CPU utilisation and trend analysis
  • Power HA Replication system

Tectrade also carries out system changes, firmware patches and PTF upgrades.

automotive manufacturer

More than 50% of survey respondents recognise that AIX is core to their business, with 83% indicating that AIX gives them a high return on investment.

HelpSystems – AIX Community Survey 2020

outcomes

Tectrade’s Service Desk is the single point of contact for this client’s incident and problem  management as well as request fulfilment.

All aspects of the service are managed by a fully accountable Service Delivery Manager who  provides the client with a monthly report including a technical review of each AIX and IBM i LPAR.

Additionally, the company is also considering the results of a security audit which highlighted several areas of potential vulnerability on the AIX LPARs.

Tectrade will recommend operating system hardening – first on non-production LPARs and, once tested, on all production AIX partitions.

The security hardening recommendations also include an improved user authentication policy.

manufacturing

About our client

truck

Our client is a global automotive manufacturer.

In addition to design and manufacture, it operates a focused organisation to sell, lease and market its heavy goods vehicles, buses, coaches and services in over 100 countries.