ClearCheck > Case studies

Bio-Rad prevents ClearCase downtimes and delays using GoMidjets' ClearCheck Product

"ClearCheck is our way to monitor and prevent ClearCase problems and failures. We feel confident that our R&D team will always have the tools it needs, even if we don’t have an in-house ClearCase expert."

Elianiv Hermon, IT Systems Administrator, Bio-Rad

Background

Bio-Rad is a leading global company which operates in two industry segments: Life Science Research and Clinical Diagnostics. The company has developed thousands of products since it’s establishment in 1952.
One of Bio-Rad’s software development centers employs more than 30 developers using Visual Studio and ClearCase. This team serves many of the company’s needs worldwide.

The Challenge

The R&D team performs a crucial task for the organization, and any downtime may prevent it from delivering its products on time and to the full satisfaction of customers. Any delay or reliability issues with the product may result in financial loss for the organization.

ClearCase is essential to the ongoing work of the R&D team, but the company does not have in-house expertise in this tool, and developing or acquiring such expertise would entail a lengthy and expensive process.

Bio-Rad sought cost-effective, easily and quickly implemented ways to ensure that ClearCase would work correctly continuously.

The Solution

Bio-Rad turned to GoMidjets looking for efficient tools to perform preventive maintenance and ensure that ClearCase continues working well on an ongoing basis.

It finally chose to acquire ClearCheck, which performs daily automatic checks on ClearCase VOBs and other components and reports on potential problems. Since ClearCheck identifies problems at an early stage, they can be resolved relatively easily before any damage has been done, thus saving the cost and lost work hours that would have resulted from a major ClearCase failure.

Deployment

ClearCheck implementation is simple and requires no special expertise on the part of the user. After installation, ClearCheck identified multiple issues in the company’s ClearCase environment which were resolved by a ClearCase expert.

ClearCheck continues to provide valued assistance to the company by running daily checks on ClearCase and reporting possible problems and issues. This allows the company to hire ClearCase expertise when and as needed, saving the cost of acquiring in-house expertise or using an external provider on a frequent basis.

By using ClearCheck the operations team are assured that the R&D team can do their work correctly, without worrying about downtime, loss of data, or delays in project delivery due to technical failure.

harmon.ie Saves Money on a project in Maintenance Mode by using GoMidjets ClearCheck

"With ClearCheck we have an ongoing assurance that our ClearCase environment and VOBs are working properly. Instead of occasional manual checking which cost us money and added one more task to a busy schedule, we now get notice if there is a problem and exactly what it is. ClearCheck has made my job much easier."

Evgeny Krassilshikov, Director of R&D at harmon.ie (formerly Mainsoft)

Background

One of the products offered by harmon.ie (previously known as Mainsoft) is a cross-platform enterprise solution, developed to function as an OEM system for some of the world's largest software vendors including Oracle Siebel, SAP Business Objects, IBM Rational, IBM Cognos, Mentor Graphics, Cadence Design and ESRI. Since 2008 the company has also been marketing enterprise collaboration products under its own brand.

The Challenge

Visual MainWin product is kept in "maintenance mode". There are several active releases of this product that have been deployed by harmon.ie customers for years. However, clients still ask for small changes, bug fixes, and other minor maintenance requests.

The Visual MainWin project was developed in IBM's Rational ClearCase environment, and is still stored on that platform. harmon.ie is highly committed to its clients and attaches great importance to ensuring that the Visual MainWin product is healthy, safely stored and capable of being updated as necessary. Thus, it was critical for them to follow IBM's recommendation to periodically check their VOBs' health.

Previously, harmon.ie used an external ClearCase specialist to conduct manual health checks of each VOB once or twice a week. This ongoing expense was necessary to verify the integrity of the database and protect the valuable projects stored there. Yet, this expense also increased the cost of maintaining delivered projects.

The Solution

The ClearCase specialist providing services to harmon.ie suggested that they try ClearCheck as an alternative to manual health checks. A pilot project was successful, and ClearCheck was quickly installed on the project maintenance environment.

After using the product successfully for over a year, harmon.ie was able to save a significant amount of money on ClearCase maintenance. ClearCheck checks all the VOBs automatically, using the most advanced checking methods. Once a problem is identified, it sends alerts so that the issue can be fixed quickly and effectively.

Flash Networks

"Thanks to GoMidjets, we now enjoy convenient and rapid access to ClearCase environments for all of our development projects" says Zeevik Liak, Configuration Manager (CM) and automation team leader at Flash Networks, one of the leading providers of intelligent mobile internet solutions.

Industry: Telecom
For more information: Flash Networks

The problem

"Since our acquisition of a new company a few months ago, it was necessary to merge the two companies' IT resources, including domains, ClearCase servers and user work spaces in order to fully integrate our products" says Zeevik. Technically, the problem consisted of three requirements:

• a. Unification of two separate Windows (Active Directory) domains
• b. Upgrade of ClearCase version of servers and clients from v2002.05 to v7
• c. Migration of ClearCase server from Windows to RedHat Linux

The Challenge

"It was a very complicated project" says Zeevik. "It had to be done with great care, as it directly affects our databases and users. Data integrity and minimal downtime were essential."

The Solution

"We turned to GoMidjets to undertake the project since we knew they had the knowledge and experience of similarly complicated projects. They suggested implementing the integration project in two phases: First, building a test environment and executing the entire project in test and then, when it passed successfully, to repeat the whole process on our production environment. This is what we did.

GoMidjets built for us an entire test environment which represented our production environment. Following extensive testing which indicated everything worked well, we did the migration on the production environment. The operation had to be completed as quickly as possible and so parts of the project were done during the night. GoMidjets kept us updated at every stage of this process, automating steps where possible to reduce downtime and handling any problems that occurred on the way. Thanks to GoMidjets, this difficult and complicated process was carried it in an inspired and cool mood."

Zeevik adds, "During this process we were exposed to GoMidjets' new ClearCase add-ons, which helped us a lot in reducing the migration period and its resulting downtime. 'ClearCheck' helped us to verify that the ClearCase VOBs are healthy. We used it both before the migration, on the old Windows server, and after the migration, on the new Linux server. 'ClearEnv' helped us to create new and mass UCM environments. It was done easily, quickly and efficiently."

Benefits

Zeevik concludes, "The project was a complete success. The performance of all ClearCase environemnts increased as well, and users can now share their assets much easier. We'd like to thank GoMidjets for their great and devoted job and recommend their services wholeheartedly!"