News | October 14, 2008

Transplace Conversion To Virtual Infrastructure Helps Maintain World-Class Delivery Of Shipping Logistics Services

FRISCO, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Transplace, a leading provider of transportation services and logistics technology, today announced the successful conversion of the company's IT infrastructure from a physical to a virtual environment. The year-long project has allowed Transplace to achieve several key benefits:

The ability to maintain world-class software-as-a-service functionality, hosting, availability and reliability when delivering transportation logistics services to customers
More efficient use of hardware by reducing the number of deployed servers
Lower software licensing costs
Improved business continuity capabilities
The ability to create additional server environments on-demand

"The decision to convert our computer network to a virtual environment came in conjunction with our plans to move our production environment to a co-location facility, and it was also time to refresh our server hardware," said Transplace CTO Vincent Biddlecombe. "Because we deliver services via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, we needed to maintain our 24x7 world-class functionality, hosting, availability, reliability and scalability. We also wanted to improve our business continuity capabilities while adding more flexibility when deploying multiple server environments."

The virtual infrastructure has provided Transplace with the ability to achieve all of these goals at a more reasonable cost versus establishing a new physical infrastructure. Virtualization also has reduced the number of CPUs the company needs. "Virtualization helps us manage the cost of our CPU-based software licenses," Biddlecombe said. "This was a critical factor since licensing costs grow even more so when creating a near real-time disaster recovery center. Some application vendors require the same licensing model on both sides."

By reducing the overall number of CPUs Transplace needed, the VMware virtual environment saved the company significantly. Transplace also discovered that IBM servers in a virtual environment combined with the AIX operating system would allow the deployment of fewer but faster processors at the database tier. This permitted Transplace to further lower its database licensing costs, and optimize its disaster recovery environment to provide test and development environments. "With the flexibility provided by our virtualized environment, if we want to conduct load testing, we just reconfigure the development partitions for true load testing," Biddlecombe said. "If we have to run a disaster recovery process, we can use the hardware to run production."

Not only did Transplace save on hardware costs by decreasing the number of CPUs, it also addressed the challenge of how to create additional database instances. Virtualization solved the challenge of how to replicate data to the disaster recovery server. Transplace can now create additional environments on-demand without having servers specifically reserved for each environment.

"Our virtual machine clusters might run test virtual machines one day and load testing the next," Biddlecombe said. "Or they could be running disaster recovery – we can choose which virtual machines we want running at any moment in time. This also helps solve the challenge of scalability since we can simply add new servers to the cluster whenever we want."

About Transplace
Transplace is a non-asset based third-party logistics (3PL) provider offering manufacturers and retailers the optimal blend of logistics technology and transportation management services. From complete logistics management outsourcing to intelligent transportation management systems (TMS) to supply chain network planning and design to high-quality brokerage services, Transplace has proven the ability to deliver both rapid return on investment and consistent value to customers. The company is recognized among the elite 3PLs in North America by a customer base that includes many of the largest shippers in the world.

In 2008, Transplace was awarded with the Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies "100 Great Supply Chain Partners" distinction for the fifth consecutive year and by Supply & Demand Chain Executive as a "Top 100" provider in supply chain transformation for the fourth consecutive year. In addition, Transplace was recognized by Inbound Logistics as a Top 10 3PL for the sixth consecutive year, and was awarded Logistics Management's Quest for Quality award for the 3PL category.