Category Archives: Case Studies

Flogas Ireland, part of the DCC group, is a top energy provider offering LPG, Natural Gas, and Electricity across Ireland. They serve a wide range of industries, from homes and businesses to agriculture and automotive, all while focusing on delivering reliable energy solutions that meet their customers’ changing needs.

Flogas was among the organizations still leveraging the robust IBM iSeries technology, which has long been known for its reliability and scalability.

The IBM iSeries, originally known as the AS/400 and now part of the IBM Power Systems range, is a midrange mainframe technology designed for business applications. It combines robust hardware with the IBM i operating system to deliver a stable, scalable, and secure environment for a wide range of enterprise computing needs.

For over two decades Flogas has been using the IBM iSeries platform to run a critical financial application. The backups were saved to tape and securely sent to a local IBM tape storage facility for safekeeping. While tape backups have historically been a common method for the IBM iSeries (AS/400) due to their reliability and long-term storage capabilities, Flogas recognized the need to move to more modern disk-based backup solution.

Historically, tape backup was the only disaster recovery solution available for IBM iSeries systems, which posed challenges in terms of speed, reliability, and scalability. Recognizing these limitations, DNA IT Solutions leveraged the expertise of its in-house consultants and the strength of its IBM partner ecosystem to modernize Flogas’ disaster recovery strategy. By implementing a Cloud-based solution, DNA IT was able to provide a reliable, scalable, and efficient backup and disaster recovery process, ensuring operational continuity and addressing the constraints of the legacy system.

Recognizing the need for a more reliable and efficient solution, Debbie Monerawela, system administrator of the iSeries system in Flogas, proactively reached out to DNA IT Solutions after hearing about our expertise through a radio advertisement. This marked the beginning of a partnership aimed at modernizing Flogas’ IT infrastructure and ensuring the resilience and continuity of their operations.

Project Description

As already mentioned, many IT professionals were uncertain if solutions existed to provide Cloud backup for their legacy IBM iSeries server, running version 7.1 of the OS — an older, unsupported version of the OS.

As one of the leading IBM partners in Ireland, DNA IT Solutions stepped in with confidence and expertise, committing to explore and implement a tailored solution to meet Flogas’ needs. This partnership exemplifies DNA’s dedication to tackling complex IT challenges and delivering innovative results.

Collaborating with IBM, DNA IT Solutions developed and implemented a Cloud backup solution for Flogas, securely transferring their backups to the Cloud.

To ensure reliability, DNA’s team provides daily reports detailing the status of the backups, promptly addressing any issues that arise. Additionally, regular disaster recovery tests are conducted in partnership with Flogas to validate the integrity of the backups and confirm that the data performs as expected, providing peace of mind and operational continuity.

With the expertise of DNA IT Solutions and the support of our trusted IBM partner, a comprehensive backup solution was implemented using IBM’s robust Cloud ecosystem. This collaboration allowed us to securely backup Flogas’ data and create a virtual machine running a mirrored cope of their application, specifically designed for disaster recovery scenarios.

What sets this solution apart is the unique expertise of DNA’s IBM partner, who possessed the specialized knowledge required to work with such an outdated version of the IBM iSeries system. This capability ensured Flogas’ critical finance application was safeguarded and recoverable, providing unparalleled reliability and peace of mind.

Outcome

Through collaboration with our IBM partner, DNA IT Solutions successfully implemented a modern Cloud backup solution for Flogas, addressing the challenges of Floga’s legacy IBM iSeries system. The solution has provided Flogas with reliable daily backups, comprehensive reporting, and confidence in having a fully tested Cloud based DR solution.

Adrian Kelly, Sales and Marketing Director of DNA IT Solutions said “Legacy systems like the IBM iSeries were never originally designed for the Cloud, making it challenging to modernize backup and disaster recovery capabilities. However, thanks to the strength of our team of expert consultants and our trusted IBM partner ecosystem, we were able to deliver a robust, forward-looking solution for Flogas. This project highlights our ability to bridge the gap between traditional systems and modern IT demands, ensuring resilience and efficiency for our clients.”

Debbie Monerawela, system administrator of the iSeries system in Flogas said: “Modernizing our critical finance application was a key part of our digital transformation strategy, and DNA IT helped us bring it up to modern standards. The entire experience was seamless, with the project delivered on time and within budget. Thanks to their expertise, we’ve significantly lowered our business risk and now have complete peace of mind knowing our production system is fully supported in the Cloud with a modern backup and DR solution. It’s been a pleasure working with DNA IT Solutions.”

 

Established by the Keating family in 2001, the Marie Keating Foundation is one of the leading voices in Ireland for cancer prevention, awareness, and support. Their services are committed to being there for people diagnosed with cancer, and their families at every step of this cancer journey. Through their information and support services, they reach thousands of people a year, giving education, information and advice focused on cancer prevention and early detection, as well as providing support services and financial assistance to those living with and beyond cancer.

DNA IT provides a comprehensive IT managed service for the Marie Keating Foundation and runs their day-to-day IT management.

As their traditional fundraising was shut down by COVID-19, in August 2020 the Marie Keating Foundation introduced a televised event to help raise funds to continue to provide their support services. This was the first “Concert4 Cancer” and although well received, the first 2hour telethon event was impacted by technical issues on the crucial night when the concert was live on TV and the public were trying to donate to the organisation via a donate page on the web site. The volume of traffic hitting the site was simply far too much for the underlying infrastructure to cope with and so there was prolonged downtime for several minutes at a time, when people were trying to donate – they got a web page hanging and couldn’t contribute. This really affected the level of donations received on the night and had the knock-on effect of reducing the amount of badly needed donations that the foundation receives.

So, when planning the 2021 Concert4Cancer, the issue of how well the web site’s infrastructure could cope with a very high spike in visitors over a couple of hours had to be addressed. However, due to a combination of factors and the impact of the COVID crisis – the team planning the event had less time to plan the fine detail of the technical aspects of this year’s events. As a result – the website provider realised their hosted web servers would not be adequate to run the website for the televised event and the risk of the site crashing was too high, with a bigger TV audience anticipated this year, over the original one in 2020.

DNA IT got a call from the Marie Keating Foundation to see if we could help and provide a high-performance website infrastructure for the event; the problem was there was only seven days to go the live event! 

Project Description

When the technical architect in DNA looked at the requirement and talked to the website providers, he quickly realised what was being asked was going to be impossible to do within the time frame allowed using a conventional IT Solution.

Using the traditional IT infrastructure model, we would have had to design the architecture to run in the Marie Keating Foundation’s existing IT environment. To spell out the basics of what this would have involved:

• We would have to decide on all the technical elements involved – the servers / compute power needed, storage, the networking required – switches, routers, additional firewall capacity, cabling etc.
• Then we would have to order all these components from distributors and wait for them to arrive.
• When they all arrive – rack them and install them (assuming the space was available in the existing rack, otherwise we would have to buy a new rack!
• Then we would have to send technical engineers on site to physically set up the new environment; build the servers, test everything and then go live. This would have taken at least 7-8 weeks, assuming no delays in the supply chain and no networking problems.

 

Obviously – given the time frame we had to work with, this option was not going to work, so we turned to our IBM Cloud environment instead.

DNA IT are a strategic partner of IBM in Ireland and we are one of their primary Cloud partners between Ireland and the UK. We provide a full managed Cloud infrastructure service to many of our customers who now run all or part of their IT systems in our IBM Cloud environment. We provide both multi-tenant and dedicated bare metal environments for our customers, as well as IBM public Cloud services where required.

So, we had to design and build a high performance, highly available clustered web server environment in our IBM Cloud, complete with load balancing and enterprise grade networking and firewalls for security. This had to be able to withstand an extraordinary number of hits on the web site and deliver a seamless performance, or consumers will leave the page and not come back.

One of the main challenges was trying to assess what level of hits the site needed to be able to withstand. There was very little real site traffic hit telemetry available and besides, what was available was relating to the previous year, and this year we were anticipating a much larger audience – so knowing what level to set this performance at was difficult.

In the end, we opted for a cautious approach, better safe than sorry with a live TV event – and the system that we built could take two million hits over the two hours of the live TV broadcast and we knew that even then we would be comfortable. If the server did encounter a technical problem and failed, the workload would seamlessly fail over to the redundant servers in the cluster to carry on. In the event of a datacentre outage the servers were replicated in real time to a second datacentre, so if required, this redundant datacentre could have been made live within 5 minutes, however this was not required during the event.

Outcome

Within five days, the technical team in DNA IT had designed, built and thoroughly tested a high-performance web site infrastructure that would be able to handle a TV fundraising event of any scale up to a million hits per hour.

The Concert4Cancer ran successfully on Virgin Media One TV on the night of Friday the 27^th of September.

The web site infrastructure worked perfectly and there were no performance issues whatsoever. The average page load time on the night was 1.6 seconds.

The high-performance Cloud infrastructure was stood down following that event weekend and the Marie Keating Foundation website now runs on the normal web hosting servers that are used day to day. It can be re-created again for the 2022 Concert for Cancer and now that we know how well it worked for this year’s event, we have a head start in terms of planning for the 2022 event.

Declan Hussey, MD of DNA IT Solutions said, “This project demonstrates the incredible power and flexibility of the Cloud in a real-life situation. What was achieved in such a short space of time demonstrates very clearly what Cloud technology can deliver to an SME, in combination with a partner like DNA IT, who has the skills and experience to deploy this kind of complex solution, at very short notice,” he said.

Liz Yeates, CEO of the Marie Keating Foundation said, “we are truly grateful to our longstanding IT partners DNA IT Solutions who came to our rescue at our hour in need this August. Given the challenges we faced with COVID 19 with all our traditional fundraising events curtailed, we became very reliant on the Concert4Cancer as a way of raising funds to keep our cancer awareness and support services going. By providing the high-performance cloud infrastructure, we could rest assured that donors coming to our website to donate would not have technical issues despite the heavily increased volume of traffic within the two-hour period. Thank you so much to all the team at DNA, we really appreciate your ongoing support of our Concert4Cancer.”

 

To make a donation to the Marie Keating Foundation click here:

Donate Money

 

T.M. Blinds Limited is a member of the multinational Hunter Douglas group of companies since 1999. TM Blinds are the market leader in Ireland in the supply of window blinds to the retail industry.

The company employs 120 people at its manufacturing site in Newcastle, Co Dublin. The company manufactures to the highest quality standard and daily. They operate a Just in Time (JIT) supply chain and work to a very efficient 48 hour turn around target for inbound orders.

DNA IT Solutions have been working with TM Blinds as their IT managed services provider since 2007.

Initially the IT environment was a traditional environment comprised of all physical servers hosted on-premise. The primary technology comprised of Novell Netware, Exchange 5.5 and Microsoft SMB server 2003, with the group ERP platform being Microsoft AXAPTA.

As the business grew more and the demands around IT became more complex, with ever more importance of no downtime and greater security threats, DNA and TM Blinds recognised the need to evolve and utilise more enterprise-class technology.

Utilising best in class technology for the time, DNA designed and implemented a new highly resilient IT infrastructure using VMware for server virtualisation. The new environment also consisted of a SAN with 10 TB of storage and a multi-node virtual machine environment with 20 virtual servers and Active Directory replacing SMB server.

This new infrastructure was hosted on-premise and was designed, implemented and managed by DNA. It was fully operational by 2012 and worked very well since being rolled out.

By 2017, the IT infrastructure was coming to end of life and again, DNA sat down with the management team of TM Blinds and began planning for what the next iteration of the IT environment would look like.

Due to the scale and growing importance of IT in the business, both TM Blinds and DNA felt that Cloud technologies needed to be looked at as part of the future IT strategy.

DNA presented two strategies to TM Blinds – one that continues with the existing model for IT and refreshed the infrastructure every five years or so. The second strategy looked at the Cloud option and considered all the major vendors in this space.

The financial realities of operating in the Cloud were considered very carefully as this often proves to be a problem with Cloud deployments. Sometimes the costs of operating from Cloud environment are more expensive than in-house. As with most organisations, ensuring the financial impact of migrating to the Cloud would also be a positive one, was a critical point of consideration for TM Blinds.

The outcome of the solution development workshop was that of all the Cloud platforms, the business case for the IBM Cloud was the best option – both technically and commercially. The IBM Cloud provides world class data centre facilities and enterprise levels of resilience and security.

The entire migration process was completed in under five months and went live in January 2019.

The IT infrastructure is now operated on a purely “On Demand” model, in which the IT compute power scales to whatever is required by the business, with no hardware refresh cycles and the capability to expand rapidly, without having to buy new hardware etc.

Philip Casey, Financial Controller of TM Blinds said, “Moving to the IBM Cloud gave TM Blinds more options in every sense regarding IT and made things far more efficient in the long term. Our entire IT infrastructure is now run on an OPeX basis, so there is no waste and we are only paying for what we use, which is ideal for us.”