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Systemethix

Daiken New Zealand

Daiken NZ

Goodbye availability problems, hello enterprise-class reliability

The challenge at hand

Daiken New Zealand is a renowned manufacturer of premium medium density fibre (MDF) products based in Rangiora, Canterbury. The company’s plants operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and never had an outage that would stop the factory from running. 

Until recently, they were leveraging an aging platform based on HP StoreVirtual, which after eight years in operation, began failing. Together with the slow network backend, this was leading to problems within Daiken’s production environment. Daiken was experiencing significant performance issues involving, in particular, their main database becoming unavailable at times.

Their challenge was also around the cost of running their SAP HANA workloads in the public cloud they employed at the time. Using AWS has proven to be quite expensive, and as Daiken was planning to expand the number of their services, they were looking for a more cost-efficient alternative. 

The company engaged Systemethix to help them decrease the ongoing costs and increase the performance of their environment while providing deeper insights into their storage systems.

“We got hold of IBM and started talking to them about their Power server technology. They introduced us to Systemethix. We have not worked together before, but when we met with Marcus and his team in Christchurch, we discovered we had a lot in common. We also got in touch with some of their other customers in New Zealand and all of them spoke very well about Systemethix.”

said by Paul Schulz, IT Manager, Daiken NZ

The Initial Approach...

The initial engagement was structured around moving Daiken’s HANA platform with workload running in AWS public cloud back on-premise by installing a new IBM Power solution.

The approach presented by Systemethix incorporated IBM Storage System for the HANA database storage and would allow Daiken to not only improve the performance of their workloads but also reduce the costs of running their environment. However, due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, this plan could ultimately not be implemented as intended.

“Pandemic or not, Daiken still needed to urgently replace their existing infrastructure, so the Systemethix team had to get back to the board and come up with a new plan to reflect the changed business circumstances.”

...and the Need to Adapt

In record time, Systemethix designed a new, customised solution based on IBM Storage to allow for high availability between two different locations at the client site. In addition, the slow 1GbE iSCSI network backend was replaced with 10GbE iSCSI leading to a massive performance improvement and ensuring that Daiken’s database would remain available 100% of the time, 24/7.

In a short time, the company went from a small storage system to an enterprise-grade storage solution. The project was completed during the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown in New Zealand, which led to minor delays, but the Systemethix team was able to adjust quickly to deliver remotely in innovative ways without interruption to any production systems.

The Path Ahead

Systemethix remains engaged with Daiken around the HANA deployment and is providing a way for their SAP landscape while helping them drive further savings and business efficiencies. The Systemethix team are currently performing monthly health checks on the implemented storage environment.