Case Study: Staples achieves enhanced business continuity and avoids millions in lost sales with Vision Solutions' MIMIX HA

Staples - Customer Case Study

Staples, a global retail and B2B office-products company with $18.2B in FY2006 revenue and 74,000 employees, runs its critical web, catalog and retail systems on IBM System i servers and processes billions of journal transactions daily. Because customers can shop 24x7 and transaction volumes spike during seasonal peaks, any downtime—planned or unplanned—could cost millions per hour and damage customer satisfaction, so Staples needed a highly reliable, low-impact continuity solution.

Staples implemented Vision Solutions MIMIX HA to replicate five production partitions to remote replica servers and provide cross-site redundancy, enabling fast role swaps (typically under 15 minutes, sometimes under seven), regular testing, and automatic offloading of read-only queries to replicas. The result: eliminated slow tape-based DR and third-party recovery costs, avoided millions in lost sales during outages, reduced high-availability administration to minutes a day, deferred costly hardware upgrades, and gained stronger, more confident business continuity.

Staples