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| SafeData Tightens the Stitches on Quaker Fabric’s Data Security |
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| Overview |
| Quaker Fabric began operations in 1945 as a small family-owned fabric mill. Today, it is one of the largest producers
of Jacquard upholstery fabric in the world. The company also produces specialty yarns, which it both uses in its fabrics and sells to
other fabric manufacturers. In a typical year, Quaker sells over 40 million yards of fabric to more than 500 furniture manufacturers in
over 40 countries. |
| Challenge |
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The 1990s was a decade of significant growth for Quaker Fabric. The company grew from an $89 million manufacturer in 1989 to a $400
million industry leader by 2002. With this growth came more complexity, adding more finishing processes and more yarn skews. Today, Quaker creates
about 5,000 new skews every six months and has nearly 70,000 active skews in any given month.
With so much more information to manage, Quaker’s operations became heavily dependent on its computer systems. In 2001, Norm Sturdevant was hired
as the company’s new CIO. His first initiative was to conduct a business impact analysis on its iSeries system, which found that Quaker had insufficient
backup and security for its level and type of operations.
“The success of our business relies on our production and ERP systems,” explained Sturdevant. “If they go down, our operations are essentially
shut down. In just a few hours we would be behind on customer orders and on production, potentially costing us multi-millions of dollars. We knew we couldn’t
risk downtime, data loss or potential security breaches to our system.” |
| Solution |
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The results of the business impact analysis were compelling enough to require Quaker to replicate its data and applications in near real-time. The
fabric manufacturer needed to be able to recover and backup within 2-3 hours of an outage.
Quaker decided, at a minimum, to implement MIMIX for continuous availability of its data and applications for its iSeries environment.
Quaker was introduced to what is now SafeData and was impressed by its approach. SafeData became Quaker’s technology partner through the entire process. Based
on its recovery time objectives (RTO), Quaker Fabrics selected SafeData’s high availability service, SafeData/HA, for companies who have a RTO of 10 hours or less.
Combining best-of-breed technologies, such as MIMIX, SafeData/HA provides Quaker with real-time system replication for its iSeries system. The applications are replicated
to a Quaker dedicated system in one of the SafeData state-of-the-art data centers, and if there is an outage, the SafeData/HA target becomes the operational system within minutes. |
| Return on Investment |
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“SafeData was able to come in and help us to determine the systems we needed,” said Sturdevant. “Their expertise in the iSeries environment has enabled us to ensure the rapid
recovery required by our demanding operations. Moving to the SafeData/HA solution has definitely paid off.”
SafeData has saved Quaker Fabric approximately $60,000 a year in technology expenses and provided the fabric company with two to three times the processing capacity.
“With many of our operations in very old buildings, the possibility of fires or other disasters is not unrealistic,” explained Sturdevant. “And,
even though our systems are extremely stable, you never know what may happen. With SafeData/HA, we are able to rest assured that we can restore our systems quickly
and avoid costly planned or unplanned downtime.”
Additionally, with the new control requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SafeData has helped Quaker meet the necessary criteria to recover its data in a reasonable amount of time.
“We not only meet the business continuity requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, but by rapidly recovering our systems from SafeData’s off-site facility, we are now able to save significant
man hours that we can allocate to more productive tasks,” added Sturdevant.
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