Thomas Group is an international group of companies with eight locations spanning Europe, North America, South America and Asia. Over the years, Thomas Group has established a global manufacturing presence to serve its growing customer base with products for the Aerosol, Cosmetic, Perfume and Pharmaceutical industries. With more than 400 employees across the globe and annual revenue of 100 million euros, Thomas Group has become a recognized world leader in the manufacturing of metal components.
The Challenge
Thomas Group has developed a modular manufacturing system with standardized stamping tools and presses throughout its global production network, enabling the company to respond quickly and flexibly to customer requirements anywhere in the world. Stamping and process technologies are designed and built in house and continuous improvement programs are integrated into all operational areas. From functional design to product engineering, Thomas Group works with the latest Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and cooperative design software to quickly transform customers’ ideas and concepts into real-world products.
Since 2002, Thomas Group has run a Citrix® server-based computing environment from a mirrored datacenter located at its Langenselbold, Germany headquarters. This server architecture enables the company to deliver web-applications, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management, CAD/CAM, Groupware and Microsoft® Office systems, to its eight international locations quickly, easily and with little administrative effort. At the same time, running these business-critical applications from centralized servers means that a system outage could affect productivity at locations worldwide, potentially resulting in delayed orders, customer dissatisfaction and even revenue loss.
The Solution
In 2008, Thomas Group implemented Stratus® everRun® Enterprise software on IBM® and Dell® x86 servers to keep its virtualized Windows® and Linux® applications up and running continuously. With everRun, one application lives on two virtual machines. If one machine fails, the application continues to run on the other machine with no interruptions or data loss. If a component fails, it’s replaced with the healthy component from the second system and the I/O is automatically mirrored to the redundant server. Memory check-pointing ensures all in-flight transactions as well as data in memory and cache is preserved —without machine restarts.
Stratus everRun Enterprise software was easy and affordable to install without modifications to applications or the need for specialized IT skills. Stratus’ support center constantly monitors all components of the application environment and automatically sends proactive failure alerts via SNMP when a problem arises so company staff can take immediate action to head off system downtime.
In 2012, Thomas Group implemented everRun SplitSite® cross-campus downtime prevention at its primary and redundant datacenter locations. SplitSite provides application fault tolerance across the two datacenter sites using synchronous replication for added protection against major downtime due to localized disasters such as flooding and power outages.
“everRun SplitSite cross-campus downtime prevention provides synchronous replication between the primary and secondary datacenters at our Langenselbold headquarters. This added protection safeguards our applications and data against localized disasters to help ensure business continuity and always-on production worldwide.”
Arno Fronert
Head of IT, Thomas Group
The Results
Since deploying everRun Enterprise, Thomas Group has enjoyed continuous availability of its critical applications to support seamless 24/7/365 operations across its global locations. everRun downtime prevention software is helping the company achieve business continuity, maintain data integrity and meet compliance requirements by keeping critical office, design, manufacturing, and supply chain management applications up and running—all the time— easily and affordably.
