ICA is a major food retailer chain in Sweden. We have 2300 stores located in Sweden. The yearly turnover is aprox. $7.75 billion.

We run our ON/2 application on a Stratus Continuum model 625. We also operate a disaster-recovery backup site using SoftMark's DRMS (Disaster Recovery Mirroring System) software. The backup site is a complete copy of production and servers as a test system when it is not operating as a primary system. DRMS mirrors and backup up all our mission critical data to the recovery site in real-time mode so that in any given time, the backup system could be started and take the role as the primary site.

The complete DRMS implementation took about 2 weeks. The installation of the product and the learning curve was done within only one day. Most of the time was spend on analyzing which critical files to mirror, fine-tuning our configuration and running benchmark tests.

The DRMS product has been stable and has worked reliably since we first installed it in August 97. DRMS is very easy to set up and configure yet, its one-step change procedure (only one table change) allows of great flexibility and features. We were also surprised with the results of our performance tests - during normal system load the overhead of DRMS is not noticeable at and, and during peak time (25 transactions/per second) we've measured an overhead of no more than 5%.

The product's reliability and SoftMark's extraordinary responsiveness to our business needs and support questions has made the implementation of our Disaster-Recovery plans an easy, pleasant and trouble-free experience.

Anders Carlsson
Stratus Platform Manager
1998-04-05