Need Help With Your Digital Transformation Journey?

A large U.S.-based industrial distributor with over 360 users operating across domestic and international locations initiated a business-critical initiative to modernize its IBM i infrastructure and overhaul its legacy disaster recovery (DR) strategy. The client, a subsidiary within a multibillion-dollar industrial holding company, relied on a Power8 IBM i platform to run its core ERP and messaging workloads, housed in an internal office rather than a formal data center.

The client’s DR strategy had depended on an external service provider for replication and failover. However, this vendor failed to deliver meaningful DR assurance—failover tests were unsuccessful, operational support was inadequate, and recovery readiness could not be validated. Compounding this, the provider was acquired, and contract renewal terms included a 10x cost increase, effectively pricing the client out of DR continuity. At the same time, the Power8 platform was end-of-life and supported only under expensive 3-month IBM maintenance extensions.

This combination of technical debt, escalating support costs, and an unreliable DR posture prompted an urgent search for a cloud-based alternative.

GlassHouse Systems was engaged to design and implement a secure, two-region IBM Cloud PowerVS solution. The client's production workloads—an IBM i-based ERP system and a Domino server—will be migrated to IBM Cloud Dallas. A secondary environment in IBM Cloud Washington will serve as the DR site, leveraging IBM Global Replication Services (GRS) for asynchronous cross-region replication.

The solution includes:

In the competitive and high-pressure world of automotive auctions, where efficiency, reliability, and uptime are non-negotiable, a prominent independent software vendor (ISV) has begun a transformation that is reshaping its internal operations and setting the stage for a dramatically improved customer experience.