At Campbell Hausfeld, Robot/SAVE Automates Backups & Satisfies The Auditors

What do you think of when you hear the term ‘guy toys?’ Well, ask any home repair enthusiast or car buff, and they’ll tell you—cordless drills, staple guns, air compressors, inflators. Now add two more words to that list—Campbell Hausfeld.

A recognized leader in the home improvement and automotive industry, Campbell Hausfeld manufactures a variety of products, including air tools and accessories, nailers and staplers, paint sprayers, pressure washers, tire safety products, welders and, since 2005, power tools with a new line of cordless drills and accessories. Major guy toys.

This privately-held company of 400 employees with facilities in Harrison, Ohio; Leitchfield, Kentucky; and Mount Juliet, Tennessee; and offices in Taipei, Taiwan and Shanghai, China, currently uses three iSeries systems. Doreen Boyle is the iSeries Systems Administrator. “We are running JD Edwards World software for all of our sales, accounting, and manufacturing. Recently, we also brought up our Web server using WebSphere. People can now go to www.campbellhausfeld.com and order our products over the Internet.

According to Doreen, the company has 350 users, but only one operator—the Robot products from Help/Systems. Campbell Hausfeld began running “lights-out” three years ago with the help of Robot/ SCHEDULE,® for job scheduling and batch management; Robot/CONSOLE,® for message management; Robot/ALERT,® system event notification; Robot/ REPLAY,® interactive job automation; and Robot/ SAVE, for backup, recovery, and tape management.

Before installing Robot/SAVE, Campbell Hausfeld backed up their libraries using a standard IBM backup and Robot/SCHEDULE with a CL program written by their programmers. In addition, according to Doreen, they used a 3570 tape drive that “couldn’t differentiate between different backups, plus it was slow.” Now, using Robot/SAVE and an IBM LTO Ultrium 1 3581 automated media library, the process is much faster and their backups, system restoration, and save media management have been fully automated.

“Another good thing about Robot/SAVE,” continues Doreen “is that we can use the Restricted State Utility (RSU) to do our quarterly full system backups, and nobody has to be here.” In fact, Campbell Hausfeld has been running their restricted state saves totally unattended for over two years. If there are issues while the Restricted State Utility is running, Robot/SAVE notifies the on-call operator using Robot/ALERT.

Larry Rude, Campbell Hausfeld’s IT director, adds, “In the past, no one was here if we had a save problem. [Then, on Monday morning] we had to decide whether to keep everybody off the system and fix it or do without the save for a day. We prefer not to do without the save tape, but sometimes in the past it happened.” With Robot/SAVE, the company can avoid these dilemmas because of the constant pulse on the backup.

By integrating Robot/SAVE with Robot/SCHEDULE, Campbell Hausfeld has been able to schedule all their nightly, weekly, monthly, and quarterly backups. According to Doreen, they back up production and non-production libraries on a nightly basis and—on a weekly basis—“we do just short of a full system save, backing up libraries, IBM libraries, Robot libraries, user libraries, and production and non-production libraries.”

Doreen describes their nightly processing routine. “Actually, we use save-while-active so we don’t lose any time. We kick off our nightly processing at 11:00 or 11:10 every night. Our EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is sent to different places at different times, so we built in an hour and a half delay. Then we kick off our backup. It takes a snapshot and when that snapshot is complete, the processing starts. We don’t let the users back on until all the processing is done, usually at 4:30 in the morning.”

The snapshot triggers the system to begin the rest of the nightly processing using OPAL® (OPerator Assistance Language®) in Robot/CONSOLE. Doreen confirms that they have integrated Robot/ CONSOLE, Robot/ALERT, and Robot/SCHEDULE primarily around their backups.

Doreen reviews the Robot/SAVE audit and restoration reports every morning to make sure everything was backed up properly. “If there’s a problem, I fix it. Sometimes a library has been deleted [from the system], and we need to remove it from Robot/ SAVE. I put those in a folder, and save them for about a month, just in case the auditors want to look at them.”

Larry notes that they have corporate audits every year, with a detailed audit every other year. He confirms that the audit and restoration reports generated by Robot/SAVE make these audits go more smoothly. According to Larry, one of the benefits Robot/SAVE brings is that they can simply generate a report and say “here is our backup plan”.

Equally as important as backing up their system is the ability to recover the data. Luckily, Campbell Hausfeld has never had to do a full system restoration restoration, but Larry points out that they have done a total restore for disaster recovery purposes on two occasions. “For our disaster recovery, we send our backup tapes to [our] IBM site in Sterling Forest, New York.” Both times the tapes were certified as restorable.

According to Doreen, the company was able to integrate Robot/SAVE with Robot/SCHEDULE, Robot/ALERT, and Robot/CONSOLE with just the help of one programmer. “I think it was because the product was new, and I wasn’t really comfortable with it [yet]. But, once you get the feel of the Robot products, setting things up is not that difficult. One person can monitor and keep [them] up. Once we set them up, we just kind of forget about them because they do run smoothly. [Robot/SAVE] is a quality product.”

Doreen adds that Help/Systems sent an instructor to help train them on Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/ SAVE. “The rest of the products, like Robot/CONSOLE and Robot/ALERT, we just read the manuals and picked it up on our own. If we had any questions or ran into problems, Help/Systems’ technical support is excellent, so there is no problem there.”

Maybe it’s time to add another item to that list of ‘guy toys’—Robot/SAVE. According to Larry, “It works, it’s steady, and if there’s any problem, we get excellent support. We investigated multiple products—Help/Systems was the best. It may cost a little bit more, but we felt the investment was well worth it—and it has been.” Just like a quality power tool—you get what you pay for.