Veda’s customer base relies heavily on the credit information provided. If the online credit checking service is not available to clients, a significant portion of NZ retail commerce is delayed and revenues are potentially lost for both the client and Veda itself.

In mid-2007 Veda Advantage was running mission-critical production systems on two multi-partitioned IBM 800 series System i machines that were not meeting their current needs in terms of cost, reliability and performance.

The hardware was over three years old, they were running on an out-dated release of the operating system and they had a large amount of critical data on an old optical drive.

Moreover, they had experienced a number of hardware-related incidents which impacted the company’s ability to deliver their credit information services to customers. This was causing frustration within the business and with their customers and, more critically, loss of revenue on both sides.

Outsourced model preferred
Veda Advantage looked at different options but decided that the option posing the least risk to the business was to outsource their complete System i environment.  “Following a lengthy review of how we should manage our ongoing technology requirements,” says John Roberts, New Zealand Country Director for Veda Advantage, “we decided that partnering with a dedicated systems outsourcing organisation was the best model for us to follow. We went to market and briefed a number of organisations to respond to our requirements.”

Risk mitigation was an over-riding concern for Veda Advantage. “A critical factor for us was to have a seamless transition,” continues Roberts. “Our business is accessed by our customer base 24/7 so we wanted to minimise any downtime. SAS IT offered us by far the best solution in terms of the project scoping, planning, implementation and ongoing management.”

Implementation
In a project lasting five months, SAS IT worked with the team at Veda, and in conjunction with Veda’s customers, to successfully migrate their existing systems to new SAS IT-owned IBM System i hardware.  This involved a change of location from Baycorp House and IBM datacentres to SAS IT’s Greenlane datacentre and the alternate site in Vincent St. To support Veda’s requirements, SAS IT purchased two new System i 525 machines from IBM.

“The migration project was seen by Veda Advantage as a potential major risk to the business,” says Phil Martin, CEO for SAS IT, an IBM Business Partner. “Because Veda has a large number of customers who rely on Veda services to transact their business, it was critical for them to be fully aware of, and comfortable with, the changes occurring. As with any large project there are many different things that can go wrong and unexpected issues that crop up throughout the project. However, with careful management and open communication both on our part and Veda’s, we were able to identify the risks and mitigate them to ensure that the project was successfully delivered on time and to budget with only a very small outage window being required.”

Risk mitigation through system replication
To reduce the outage window, Vision Solutions’ Orion High Availability replication software for System i was used. The SAS IT team set up new partitions on the new IBM machines, saved the data from the production environment and loaded the files into the new partitions.

“While Veda’s front-end interface that the customer sees is intuitive and easy to navigate,” says Martin, “the technology behind the scenes is incredibly complex. Veda pulls data from a variety of sources, pre-processes the data before it is loaded into the DB2 database and then stores it for fast access. One of the issues identified during the upgrade and conversion process was the use of the RDARS application and old optical disks for audit and reporting purposes. A huge number of reports were stored on this old optical juke box which was unable to be attached to the new systems being deployed by SAS IT.”

SAS IT developed software to convert the data from the optical storage to the System i disk, thereby overcoming the problem.  Due to the amount of data stored, plus the slow speed of the optical device, it took several weeks of effort to convert it all across. The job was completed well within the required timeframe, thus mitigating the identified risk. This data is now fully backed up under the standard backup regime and there is now no risk to the business of losing this information. 

To ensure a smooth transition, extensive testing was undertaken. “Testing was firstly conducted on the new partitions by the Veda Quality Assurance team and then by Veda’s customers,” explains Martin. “Once testing had been completed and signed off by all parties, up-to-date production data was reloaded to the new system partitions.

We then activated the mirroring links to replicate data changes from the existing systems to the new systems. 

Running replication software enabled Veda to carry on business as usual on the existing systems prior to the cut-over to the new environment.” Effectively replication was maintained under the current environment between Production and DR, as well as to the new Production system to maintain the data integrity on both.

Successful outcome
The outcome for us has been beyond expectations,” says Roberts. “We now not only have a more stable environment, but a technology solution which is providing quicker responses to our customer’s enquiries. The migration also came in on time and on budget.”

The new technology solution gives Veda Advantage complete confidence and a positive go-forward position for the future. “The transition avoided any downtime or negative impact to the business as a result of the upgrade,” notes Martin. “In the three years since the project was implemented, Veda has achieved significant cost reductions by outsourcing their requirements. The solution has enabled Veda to expand their business without the hardware constraints they previously had.  These results have validated Veda’s decision to partner with SAS IT. ”

“This has been a very positive move for us,” concludes Roberts. “We now see SAS IT as an extension of our organisation.”





> SASIT
Phil Martin
E: philm@sasit.co.nz
P: 09 580 8758







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