A specialist manufacturer transitioned from a 1997 AS/400 system over to a cloud-hosted IBM i environment, with minimal disruption
Legacy hardware and operating systems are supported by Service Express, as well as new ones. We have transitioned many IBM AS/400 and iSeries workloads onto the modern IBM Power platform.
This specialist manufacturer, renowned for its precision coating technologies, recognised there was an increased risk in continuing to use their platform and that it would become unsustainable.
Through our expertise, they moved from an outdated and slow OS/400 v3r2 CISC system, to fully supported, stable hardware at v7 in Service Express’ IBM i cloud.
Moving on from hardware established over three decades ago, posed a series of challenges.
The AS/400 system was business-critical, running the manufacturing round the clock, seven days a week. Several issues had to be overcome to make the transition a success:
- Moving from such an old OS meant a ‘stop gap’ transition to a stable version before proceeding to the current release
- The UK arm split from the business to become a single entity, which meant a delay in the migration project
- Intense planning and testing phases were required to maintain critical business continuity across the applications
- The need to align with the manufacturer’s ERP roadmap
Industry:
Manufacturing
Location:
Wrexham, UK
“The overall performance is multiplied by a factor of several hundred, if not thousands.”
– Manufacturer, UK IT Manager
The Service Express advantage
Complete comprehensive solution for migration, hardware support, Disaster Recovery (DR), hosting and monitoring
In the process of a long-awaited transition to cloud, Service Express created significant improvements to the specialist manufacturer’s platform:
- Speed – end users can now compile reports in under 2 minutes, compared to waiting up to 40 minutes when working on the AS/400 hardware
- Physical tape is obsolete, replaced with virtual tape libraries, which enables a full system DR restore in a matter of hours
- Daily hardware monitoring is taken on by Service Express, allowing the manufacturer’s IT staff to focus on areas of productivity
- An increase of backup strategies have helped to substantially reduce waiting times
- The manufacturer is now planning to add new features that could not be installed on the previous hardware
The outcome
Moving to a modern cloud-hosted platform has brought productivity to new heights.
For many years the manufacturer relied on our aptitude in hardware maintenance to ensure their legacy system served its purpose. Now our world-class cloud services have created many new opportunities.
“We’ve had a long relationship with Service Express in terms of hardware support. They’ve always been able to extend the life of our products. The engineers that come to our site have always been knowledgeable and whenever we’ve had a problem they’ve always managed to deliver, give us a solution and get us up and running quickly.”
– Manufacturer, UK IT Manager
