Compass Health Brands Improves its
Well-Being with Disaster Recovery

With Racksquared’s disaster recovery solution, Compass Health Brands can avoid the pain of an IT disaster.

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The Need for a Healthier Disaster Recovery Plan

Compass Health Brands makes sure people have the products they need to support their health and wellbeing. The Ohio-based company distributes a wide range of home health products and medical equipment, from topical analgesics, hot/cold packs, and liquid oxygen, to walkers, canes, bathmats, and hospital beds. With warehouses across the U.S., Compass Health serves retailers, home health agencies, and therapy providers.

For years, the small IT team at Compass Health recognized the need for a more robust disaster recovery plan but it just never made it to the top of the list of priorities. “For a long time, we had the old-fashioned disaster recovery plan: tape,” said Jeff Longville, Application Development Manager at Compass Health. “We backed up everything on tape, and we always kept an old IBM Power system on hand to recover on if needed — knowing that it would be a painful recovery but an option none the less.”

The wake-up call came with the onset of the pandemic, which exposed vulnerabilities in supply chains and raised concerns about disaster recovery.

“That’s when we started getting more nervous about improving our disaster recovery plan and started looking for a provider that could work with us,” said Greg Feddema, the IT Infrastructure Manager for Compass Health. “And that’s when we found Racksquared.”

Prepared, Ready, and Responsive

Compass Health needed more than an out-of-the-box disaster recovery solution, especially since its IT infrastructure encompasses both IBM Power and Intel technology.

IBM Power, the linchpin in Compass Health’s operations, supports essential functions such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) and financials, as well as its EDI (electronic data interchange) and order processing at the warehouses. “Basically, if our IBM iSeries goes down, our operation comes to a screeching halt,” said Jeff.

Support for the iSeries was clearly a must-have so, to reduce complexity, the company sought a single provider that could manage both iSeries and Intel. But because iSeries is such a niche expertise, they soon found that many disaster recovery vendors didn’t support it. Racksquared, with its deep and varied expertise in both platforms, was able to customize a disaster recovery solution that fit Compass Health’s business requirements.

“Having Racksquared handle both platforms helped simplify what could have been a complex solution,” said Jeff.

Warming up to move to the cloud

The solution Compass Health settled on includes colocating their production iSeries at Racksquared’s primary data center, with high-availability (HA) disaster recovery infrastructure at Racksquared’s secondary data center. The two boxes are continuously synced to ensure data loss in a disaster would be minimal — only a few seconds, with full recovery in just 60 to 90 minutes. “This is far better than going back to the last tape backup, which is usually done in the middle of the night,” Jeff explained. “In that scenario, if there’s a disaster at 3 pm, you lose all of your day’s transactions.”

In addition to the DR solution, Compass Health was also able to get out of the business of managing their iSeries infrastructure. With the production system colocated, Racksquared performs all hardware maintenance and management, handles day-today administration of the server, and manages data backups.

Compass Health also found a valuable and responsive technology partner in the Racksquared team. “There are times when you get into firewalls, networking, or other projects, and you want to bounce ideas off someone. We found it was easier to do that with Racksquared than some of the other vendors we were talking to,” said Jeff.

Knowing Racksquared was there to assist them, outside of their current solution, was reassuring and made them more than just another vendor. Jeff claimed, “It felt more like a partnership than just a quick set-up and move on situation.” Now when an IT challenge arises, Compass Health turns to their new partner — Racksquared for a diagnosis and suggested solution.