IWOOT, as it is colloquially known, has an enormous selection of constantly updated gifts with sales in 2006 surpassing $20 million. There is a substantial IT component to its business. Sagar Vadher, head of IT at IWOOT, explains that he uses industry standard X86 servers running a mix of Windows and Linux with PC workstations for development, management and monitoring.

    Ensuring that web shoppers can find and buy things they want around-the-clock is a top IWOOT priority and recently led to the implementation of a new Linux high availability business continuity solution based on SteelEye Technology's LifeKeeper Protection Suite for Linux. IWOOT decided to redesign its infrastructure for business continuity and choose to migrate to a new ERP system running on two servers in a Linux high availability configuration. For the ERP software, they moved away from a proprietary system based on Uniface to a Java/open source solution, selecting the web-based OfBiz from the Apache Foundation.

    Whether your IT environment is composed of 32bit or 64bit physical servers, virtual machines, Linux, Windows or any combination, SteelEye's solutions can provide complete protection against both planned and unplanned downtime. The SteelEye family of high availability clustering, data replication and disaster recovery solutions are easy to deploy and operate, cost effective, and enable enterprises of all sizes to ensure continuous availability of business-critical applications, servers and data.

    In the Christmas 2006 trading season, Vadher commented, "The systems were really straining when sales ran up the wall. It was pretty hair-raising. We had people working all hours just to make sure that the systems worked. We don't want to do Christmas like that anymore." SteelEye Technology's LifeKeeper software constantly monitors the health of critical applications, including the database and servers. On detection of any problem, a recovery process is automatically launched. Typically, this involves restarting the application on another server within the cluster. Because all data associated with the jWOOT3 application resides on shared storage, it is immediately available to the newly active server.

    The application was customized to fit the needs of the business and rechristened jWOOT3. Why did they choose to go an open source route? "We're looking to reduce costs by moving to open source and avoiding ongoing license fees," stated Vadher. A jWOOT3 server outage could cost over $10,000 per hour of lost revenue as well as affecting customers' perception of the IWOOT brand. Business continuity is a must. For server hardware, Vadher and his team decided to use a high-availability dual HP DL380 server cluster with an MSA500 SAN Storage array, running Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server.

    For software protection, Vadher turned to Open Minds, a specialist disaster recovery and high-availability solutions supplier and SteelEye reseller to assist. According to Vadher, "We spoke to Open Minds and they recommended LifeKeeper from SteelEye Technology. It manages the system and, if the active node crashes, automatically fails over to the second node." LifeKeeper also takes care of switching over all IP addresses, so that current connections are seamlessly moved to the new server.