Vision Solutions helps Railcar Management keep to its customer guarantee

For Railcar Management (RMI), a provider of transportation and revenue processing software for the railroad industry in the US, 100% uptime is vital.

Imagine a railroad with a train coming down the track. The system is working and the train driver has received everything via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). The train is admitted onto the track and the controller is ready to send it out but the computer goes down. The next railroad doesn`t know that the first train is coming or even where it is on the line. And the engineer doesn`t have any printed report to account for the cars he`s transporting.

As RMI`s vice president of information systems, Van Rownd, explains, RMI services an industry that`s run 24x7, is acutely time-sensitive and gravely conscious of precise trafficking and safety measures.

"Railroads run in a 24x7 world and if we had to take our customers offline for eight or 10 hours, it would be a disaster," he says.

As a high availability solution for its iSeries-based systems, RMI chose Vision Solutions` Vision Suite, which has been implemented for both of the company`s levels of data availability. Vision Solutions is the US arm of JSE-listed Idion Technology Holdings.

Headquartered in Atlanta, RMI has nearly 500 clients. Its IBM iSeries-based solutions facilitate railroad companies so they can move their railcars across the US from railroad to railroad and processes the revenue that is associated with railcar handling. About 90% of its clients, each with their own databases, use RMI as their complete data centre. RMI has 12 iSeries processors, at three data centres in Atlanta, with redundant telecommunications leads with fibre optic connections to all locations.

Its Level One service provides the mirroring of each client`s database to a second processor within the same location, providing a reliable level of business disaster and continuity services.

According to Rownd: "Vision Suite keeps our customers` downtime to an absolute minimum. Should a processor go down, Vision Suite allows us to switch the railroad to a backup processor within minutes, and they`re up and running again."

RMI also offers a Level Two service, which mirrors the railroad not only between two processors but also two locations. If one location goes down, users can be switched to one of the other locations, ensuring continuous uptime.

Rownd believes the key strength of Vision Suite lies in its powerful role swap capability. "The biggest reason systems have to come down are for maintenance," he says. "Instead of taking a machine down for eight hours to do a software upgrade or repair, we simply call the users and tell them we`re going to swap them from machine A to machine B. They sign off at, say, 1am, and are right back on at 2am. We`re able to come in to work the following day, take the machine down, do maintenance, and anything else we need to do.

"When Vision Suite was installed, our customer satisfaction increased 1 000% and that was just with Level One," he states. "When we offered them Level Two, our customers were ecstatic.

"We`ve been testing Level Two regularly and can demonstrate to our clients that should a location go down, we can have the railroad up and running within an hour, with full processing and telecommunications. That`s our guarantee, thanks to Vision Solutions` technology."