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Biomet

Taking the risk out of on-premise hardware

Business need

Biomet Australia’s distributor network relies on the availability of System 77 for daily business operations all over Australia. Like many System 77 clients, the company hosts their database systems in-house and maintains dedicated hardware for the purpose. For Biomet Australia, this means that System 77 is secure in a protected physical environment. For the distributors, it means that hardware outages at Biomet Australia can stop their business and cause significant disruption.

The demand for high availability provided few opportunities for maintenance and Biomet Australia's servers became vulnerable over time.

Obsolete operating systems and software that could no longer be patched increased the chance of a catastrophic failure, with the likelihood of lengthy downtime, loss of data and major problems for distributors.

Key challenges

Biomet Australia needed a solution that would remove the risks posed by their aging hardware, while keeping disruption for their distributors to an absolute minimum.

  • New server hardware had to be sourced and configured as a 'drop in' replacement for the older servers

  • Applications and databases had to be installed and tested on a new operating system so all systems could hit the ground running

  • Live data had to be synchronised between new and old servers to ensure there was no loss when the upgrade was commissioned

  • The deployment had to be performed with a minimum of downtime to reduce the impact on distributors' businesses and patient care

"Our distributors depend on access to our systems every day, right around the country. Taking System 77 offline for any length of time just wasn't an option," explains Jacinta.

Solution

Multibase created the original database technology that underpins Biomet's System 77 ERP systems, and staff have decades of combined knowledge about ERP software and complex system migrations. The development and infrastructure teams worked together to develop a plan that would source new hardware, install updated operating systems, and duplicate Biomet's databases and applications, keeping the impact on distributors to a minimum by performing the upgrades outside business hours.

To introduce an additional layer of protection for critical data, Multibase's technicians developed a disaster recovery strategy and deployed a second, remote backup server in a secure data facility. This extra measure provides Biomet with a warm standby that can be quickly deployed to eliminate a key single point of failure in the company's network. "Multibase helped us to plan the upgrades with a new backup and recovery strategy that means we're much better protected now," said Jacinta.

Multibase's technical team performed the installations, migrated the data and applications, and made the switch to the new hardware successfully then helped to decommission the legacy servers and provided support and troubleshooting for Biomet through the transition.

Results

With the new hardware installed and running on-site, and backup servers ready to fire up if needed, Biomet now has better data security and has removed the risk of a major hardware failure from affecting their distributors. "We're in a much better position today," Jacinta states. "With Multibase's help, we've eliminated a significant risk to the business and I'm confident that the systems we rely on are safe and reliably backed up, and even more importantly, can grow with our business."

Biomet Australia is confident that their critical systems are now running on a reliable and secure platform, with a solution that provides redundancy and greatly improved stability. Additionally, the company now has more options for future additions to System 77 that can provide better business intelligence, through new reporting tools that are available with their updated database software.

Customer profile

Biomet is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of products for the orthopaedic, sports medicine, biologic, craniomaxillofacial and dental markets. For over 30 years, Biomet has applied the most advanced engineering and manufacturing technology to the development of highly durable patient solutions. The company has a heritage of engineering excellence and a passion and vision to provide the right solution for each individual patient.