IWOOT assures business continuity ahead of Christmas rush

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The UK online gadget retailer, I Want One Of Those (IWOOT) has improved the resilience of key parts of its business-critical IT infrastructure in time for its busy Christmas trading period.

The ecommerce company had previously found the key trading months of November and December put increasing strain on the continued availability of its core open source Postgres database system handling online transactions.

Sagar Vadher, head of IT at IWOOT said the company had experienced availability issues with its systems in the run up to the Christmas 2006.

"The systems were really straining when sales ran up the wall. It was pretty hair-raising," said Sagar. "We had people working all hours just to make sure that the systems worked. We don't want to do Christmas like that anymore."

The nine servers in use at the time, supporting IWOOT's business-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, were seen to introduce several unacceptable single points of failure.

When IWOOT decided to redesign its infrastructure for lower cost and business continuity and choose to migrate to the Novell SUSE Linux operating system and a new open source ERP application running on just two servers in a high-availability configuration to reduce the possible points of failure, it decided to look for a tool that would help monitor the health of the system.

For the ERP software they moved away from a proprietary system based on Uniface to the Java/open source environment, selecting the web-based Open for Business application from the Apache Foundation that was customised to fit the needs of the business and rechristened jWOOT3.

Also installed, with the help of specialist consultancy Open Minds, was SteelEye Technology's LifeKeeper software to constantly monitor the health of critical applications, including the database, and servers. On detection of any problem, a recovery process is automatically launched.

LifeKeeper also handles switching over all internet protocol (IP) addresses, so that current connections are seamlessly moved to the new server

Sagar said that the LifeKeeper business continuity software has increased IT department productivity in general as well as safeguarding ERP server availability.

"We are continually developing the system," he added. "Now we can make a deployment to a live system in business hours. We would have to have done this out of hours before. Now we don't have to worry so much. LifeKeeper has made life so much easier."

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