Platform

IBM on-net with AWS

Transflo is a trusted industry leader in mobile, telematics, and business process automation. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida, Transflo provides first-class technology solutions to carriers and brokers across the North American trucking industry. Transflo has set the pace for innovation in transportation software for over 30 years.

In providing software technology for the trucking, transportation, and logistics industry, Transflo has become a disruptive entity. Its disruptive power is thanks to products like its truck stop network, mobile app, document automation, and other services supporting truck drivers across all North American truck stops. Transflo also provides back office solutions for transportation logistics teams across all the different entities of the supply chain.

“Our mobile app has grown tremendously, becoming one of the biggest mobile app services with many important features and functions. Everything that a driver does or needs, we have a function within the app to support them. At a high level, this includes messaging functions for communicating dispatch information; event feedback for arrivals, departures, and tracking; document scanning; weather information; and so much more. It also connects to a device on the vehicle that allows us to gather driving behavior such as tracking, tracing, and geofencing,” said Salem Elnahwy, Transflo CTO.

Transflo’s mobile app has over 3.2M downloads and supports the scanning of 800M+ documents annually. Organizations throughout Transflo’s neutral ecosystem use its end-to-end solution suite and digital platform to increase efficiency, improve cash flow, and reduce costs. Transflo came to Connectria to modernize its aging infrastructure.

Challenge

When Transflo initially came to Connectria, they were facing the decision to either exit their data center within five months or renew for two or more years. Additionally, Transflo was looking to onboard a high availability (HA) solution to elevate their infrastructure to an unparalleled standard. Transflo’s primary challenge revolved around a mission-critical logistics application running on Db2 mobility for over 65,000 fleets actively on the road. The solution required real-time 24×7 support and low latency assurance with apps talking to their Db2 stack.

“We reached a point where we had outgrown our back end infrastructure, which involved a specific use of our IBM i. All of the services were run on top, and we used the IBM i primarily as a database (SQL) which is unique compared to how others use the IBM i. The problem we were trying to solve was scaling and high availability (HA) together,” said Elnahwy.

Transflo was in search of a solution that allowed them to have bigger, faster, and more reliable scalability with high availability. The Transflo team also wanted the ability to grow and sustain growth over the next 2-5 years without worrying about any drastic changes in their infrastructure. At the same time, they wanted to ensure they had full fault tolerance, high availability, resiliency, and load balancing across all services.

Solution

Connectria provided a full discovery assessment for Db2 Mirror and migration of Transflo’s IBM i and x86 environments. Connectria moved Transflo from POWER9 to POWER10, to provide a tremendous amount of headroom and scalability over the next few years.

“After investigating various providers in the hybrid cloud space or hosting for IBM i, Connectria was the only one that provided the solution that we were looking for,” said Elnahwy.

The final solution involved creating an active-active IBM i cluster utilizing Db2 Mirror. Connectria has two active IBM i LPARs clustered using Db2 Mirror, which is a first in Transflo’s segment of the tech industry that uses IBM i. Ultimately, Connectria delivered a fully managed hosting solution with 24×7 NOC/iSOC support. The solution also featured HA in US East1 and a 3-node DR solution with failover testing.

Elnahwy added, “We also wanted to move to public cloud, AWS or Azure. Connectria was the only provider that had the IBM i expertise as well as being on net with AWS and Azure. We moved everything we had running on top of the IBM i into AWS and Connectria hosts the IBM i themselves. Those two together were really strong points of why we went with Connectria. After all of our research, no other provider in this industry [managed services] had those two together.” 

Results

In the end, Connectria provided Transflo with a solution that was 98% faster than their previous environment. Connectria improved Transflo’s systems availability significantly, now with anticipated maintenance occurring with zero to two minutes of scheduled downtime. The fully managed migration also enabled Transflo to meet their data center exit timeline of five months.

“Working with Connectria has been a true game changer for us. Previously, our planned maintenance events would be a painful process. Orchestrating such events demanded extensive preparation and meticulous coordination with numerous vendors. Today, we’re proud to say that those same events have dropped down to about two-minutes, with far less complexities. We no longer need to worry about extensive downtimes, and generally have zero downtime when applying new maintenance processes on our database. In terms of software development, we can now practice and do things against our production environment without impacting production,” said Elnahwy.

He continues, “With Connectria, we don’t have to fight fires while we’re trying to build the future. Connectria’s hybrid cloud provides us the stability, scalability, high availability, and resiliency we needed, immediately. Connectria’s solution and ongoing support gives us both peace of mind as well as the space to process and think through rearchitecting our infrastructure at our own pace.”

About Transflo

Transflo is the trusted industry leader in mobile, telematics, and business process automation solutions for the transportation industry in North America. At Transflo, we take pride in our reputation as a trusted provider of innovative solutions for the freight industry.

Our commitment to delivering the best products and services is reflected in the countless testimonials from top freight professionals who have experienced the benefits of improved efficiency, reduced costs, and minimal downtime thanks to our solutions.

For more information, visit www.transflo.com.