Download PDF
Amphenol's Migration to POWER9 and Implementation of Reliable Backup with Robot HA
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
Applicable Industries
- Aerospace
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Time Sensitive Networking
Services
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
Amphenol, a global manufacturer of connectors for the military and aerospace industries, faced a significant challenge when IBM announced it was ceasing support for the POWER7 production server that the company relied on. This coincided with Amphenol's need to improve its business continuity and disaster response infrastructure, following two instances of hurricanes and flooding at their New York data center. The company's recovery time and downtime were critical considerations, as the global user community depended on 24/7 uptime and information access. Previously, it would take the IBM i box two full days to recover from tape backups, a scenario that would be disastrous for the company. The challenge was to modernize the back end with new hardware and high availability.
About The Customer
Amphenol is a global manufacturer of ruggedized, harsh environment connectors for the military and aerospace industries. Their connectors are used on every major platform in these industries, including commercial aircraft, military ground vehicles, soldier systems, and satellites. The company is part of the largest military and aerospace interconnect group in the world, with its largest division, Amphenol Aerospace, based in Sidney, New York. The company's global user community relies on 24/7 uptime and information access, making business continuity and disaster response a critical aspect of their operations.
The Solution
Amphenol decided to build a new data center in Mesa, Arizona, and transition to POWER9 servers. The plan involved establishing a new production server in the Sidney, New York office with full replication to a second server in Arizona. This required migrating data from the old POWER7 server to the new POWER9 server, performing a role swap, purchasing a CBU box from IBM, replicating side-by-side for a period of time, shipping the CBU box to the DR site in Mesa, and then establishing the Mesa server as the long-term failover option through daily replication. To achieve this, Amphenol used the Robot HA high availability solution for IBM i from Fortra. The solution was cost-effective and efficient, reducing the expected project time from 12-15 hours to just 10 minutes. The team also worked with Fortra to identify the user libraries and documents that needed daily replication.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airbus Soars with Wearable Technology
Building an Airbus aircraft involves complex manufacturing processes consisting of thousands of moving parts. Speed and accuracy are critical to business and competitive advantage. Improvements in both would have high impact on Airbus’ bottom line. Airbus wanted to help operators reduce the complexity of assembling cabin seats and decrease the time required to complete this task.
Case Study
Aircraft Predictive Maintenance and Workflow Optimization
First, aircraft manufacturer have trouble monitoring the health of aircraft systems with health prognostics and deliver predictive maintenance insights. Second, aircraft manufacturer wants a solution that can provide an in-context advisory and align job assignments to match technician experience and expertise.
Case Study
Aerospace & Defense Case Study Airbus
For the development of its new wide-body aircraft, Airbus needed to ensure quality and consistency across all internal and external stakeholders. Airbus had many challenges including a very aggressive development schedule and the need to ramp up production quickly to satisfy their delivery commitments. The lack of communication extended design time and introduced errors that drove up costs.
Case Study
Developing Smart Tools for the Airbus Factory
Manufacturing and assembly of aircraft, which involves tens of thousands of steps that must be followed by the operators, and a single mistake in the process could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix, makes the room for error very small.
Case Study
Accelerate Production for Spirit AeroSystems
The manufacture and assembly of massive fuselage assemblies and other large structures generates a river of data. In fact, the bill of materials for a single fuselage alone can be millions of rows of data. In-house production processes and testing, as well as other manufacturers and customers created data flows that overwhelmed previous processes and information systems. Spirit’s customer base had grown substantially since their 2005 divestiture from Boeing, resulting in a $41 billion backlog of orders to fill. To address this backlog, meet increased customer demands and minimize additional capital investment, the company needed a way to improve throughput in the existing operational footprint. Spirit had a requirement from customers to increase fuselage production by 30%. To accomplish this goal, Spirit needed real-time information on its value chain and workflow. However, the two terabytes of data being pulled from their SAP ECC was unmanageable and overloaded their business warehouse. It had become time-consuming and difficult to pull aggregate data, disaggregate it for the needed information and then reassemble to create a report. During the 6-8 hours it took to build a report, another work shift (they run three per day) would have already taken place, thus the report content was out-of-date before it was ever delivered. As a result, supervisors often had to rely on manual efforts to provide charts, reports and analysis.