Since 1938, Radiant Road & Rail has proudly served as North America’s leading provider of dry and refrigerated multimodal shipping services. Over its 80-year history, Radiant Road & Rail has evolved to become a leader in intermodal, over-the-road, and temperature-controlled transportation services in North America. 

In 2015, Radiant Road & Rail became a member of the Radiant Logistics global network, at the time as Radiant Clipper, then rebranding as Radiant Road & Rail in 2022. Today Radiant Road & Rail provides access to over 100,000 dry goods containers and a fleet of 2,000 rail-ready refrigerated units that move across North America on Class 1 U.S. and Canadian railways. 

As part of the Radiant Logistics network, Radiant Road & Rail coordinates shipments with over 6,000 diverse transportation carriers servicing North America. Amidst this change and continued growth with Radiant Logistics, Radiant Road & Rail was well positioned for modernization opportunities with the help of Connectria. 

Challenge

A division of Radiant Road & Rail, the road of ‘road and rail’, was a leading truck brokerage providing trucks for moving freight upon request. This division was running on outdated IBM i assets based in the Midwest. The first challenge revolved around the pre-existing backup strategy. Since the IBM i asset was located in the Midwest, it was an area prone to severe storms, tornadoes, and power outages. This led the Radiant Road & Rail team to explore opportunities to move the IBM i into a cloud environment with appropriate disaster recovery (DR) support. 

Ultimately, Radiant Road & Rail needed a fully managed hosting solution with DR for their mission critical application running on IBM i. The Radiant Road & Rail team’s data center exit was prompted by necessity post pandemic and further motivated by a desire for modernization. The Radiant Road & Rail team needed to exit their data center within 60 days while deciding whether to place their mission critical application in colocation or the cloud. Radiant Road & Rail had numerous commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications running on IBM i that needed to continue running on IBM i, with other assets powered by AWS.

“Establishing a proper DR solution was the biggest concern I had as the CTO. Our long-term strategy is focused on moving Radiant Road & Rail off of the IBM i and into a newer system. However, we knew it would take a minimum of two years to find the right system and perform a proper migration,” said Mark Rowe, CTO, Radiant Logistics. “I initially landed on AWS Marketplace and found Connectria’s listing for IBM Power Systems (i/AIX) and AWS Hybrid Architecture. Procuring Connectria services through AWS Marketplace helped to simplify the procurement process.”

Solution

Radiant Road & Rail had a preexisting AWS account and was able to procure Connectria’s IBM i managed cloud services and DR services through AWS Marketplace. Connectria provided a full discovery assessment and fully managed migration of Radiant Road & Rail’s IBM i environment to Connectria’s IBM i cloud. 

“Connectria successfully improved our overall user experience and also delivered a readily supported DR solution. We were pleased to discover that the costs of Connectria’s support were less than what we had been paying annually for another partner to maintain our IBM i as it was,” said Rowe. 

The Results

The move of the IBM i environment to a fully managed IBM i cloud solution provided improved business continuity and IBM support expertise. The fully managed migration enabled Radiant Road & Rail to meet their data center exit timeline and secure a cost effective Opex business model.

“One of the primary benefits of working with Connectria was the overall user experience. We had a lot of users who were unaware that the system change was coming. We were very pleased when they simply noticed that the system was faster, and they noticed right away. Our goals in coming to Connectria weren’t focused primarily on improvement and were more focused on successfully and seamlessly moving offsite,” said Rowe.

“If you want a partner that can provide a plan for your project, delivering something as foolproof as possible, you should seriously consider Connectria. Their team is extremely professional, and they meet their objectives. Everything Connectria told us that they would be able to deliver for an IBM i in the cloud, they did.”

About Radiant Logistics, Inc.

Radiant Logistics, Inc. (www.radiantdelivers.com) is a comprehensive North American provider of third-party logistics and multimodal transportation services. Through its comprehensive service offering, Radiant provides domestic and international freight forwarding services, truck and rail brokerage services and other value-added supply chain management services, including customs brokerage, order fulfillment, inventory management and warehousing to a diversified account base including manufacturers, distributors and retailers using a network of independent carriers and international agents positioned strategically around the world.

For more information visit https://rrs.radiantdelivers.com/.