Medical and personal-care products retailer Dis-Chem has rolled out fault-tolerant servers in all its new stores and in some of its existing stores to ensure that its critical in-store point-of-sales and dispensary systems are always online.

Customers affected by failed servers typically have poor experiences during such downtimes, which the company sought to address. Customers who are unable to get their medication from a Dis-Chem, owing to traditional servers failing, would typically get their prescriptions and their follow-up scripts from other stores.

“Dis-Chem recognised that the rate of failure of its on-site systems, as well as the high costs and long periods to repair the systems, was impacting on its revenue and threatening its market reputation,” says critical systems availability firm Stratus Technologies business development executive Brendan Widlake.

Dispensing medicine is highly regulated and controlled, and an unavailable dispensary system can cause significant administration problems, he adds.

“Stratus Technologies fault-tolerant servers ensure availability of critical systems, and our fault-tolerant servers and software solutions are commonly used to ensure availability of critical systems on oil rigs, processing and manufac- turing plants, as well as retail and financial institutions.”

The Stratus Technologies servers, which are integrated, fully replicated, fully redundant and mirrored, provide always-on availability for Dis-Chem’s point-of-sales and dispensary systems.

While these servers are more expensive than typical commercial servers, each server costs about the same as the automatic doors of a Dis-Chem store, but provides a much more important function for the operation of the business. Also, each store only required one Stratus server, rather than two typically used in high availability setups, which also helped to reduce the costs of software licences, notes Widlake.

“Being unable to trade and the high personnel costs associated with skilled information technology (IT) repair teams made the deployment of the system economically sensible,” he adds.

The servers also enable the stores to continue operating throughout disruptions in connectivity and during the failure of various components. Even if entire components fail in the Stratus fault-tolerant servers, there is no loss of data or continuity, as other components pick up the workload without any downtime or interruption.

“Further, the Stratus servers are easy to support because, if a component breaks, we can replace either the server or the disk. It will begin to synchronise its paired components and function without interrupting the operations of the store. “Our capabilities in this regard have been honed by years of having to replace fault-tolerant servers on remote oil rigs and commercial shipping vessels, often by helicopter. We have an established support and courier network to send replacement servers and disk components rapidly to any Dis-Chem store.”

Dis-Chem’s stock-monitoring systems, which automatically order various shelf items once stock drops below a certain level, and its stock control systems also run on the servers. The system interfaces with the company’s enterprise- resource planning system and the orders are sent to its ‘dark warehouse’ – a completely automated warehouse, with machines picking and packing the orders before they are loaded onto trucks for transport.

Further, Dis-Chem is also rolling out Stratus servers in its new stores throughout Southern Africa, specifically Namibia and Zambia. It will deploy the servers at its existing stores when the current servers reach their end-of-life.

“Stratus Technologies is known for providing 35 years of always-on availability for critical industrial systems, but we have seen growing demand from specific commercial sectors, including the healthcare and financial services sectors,” concludes Widlake.