R2i
Bringing Operational Agility into Legacy Systems

As the present IT world continues to change at an ever increasing rate, virtualization and sharing of hardware resource between heterogeneous systems has made architecting and managing the overall landscape more important than ever. In today’s IT domain, it is all about bringing more agility in to the legacy systems. “Gaining benefits of virtualization, finding skilled resources and maintaining continuous availability of data are important to strive in the competitive economy,” asserts Benoit Martel, President, R2i. Martel led R2i, a provider of cloud-based managed services to focus on addressing growing business requirements with the company’s enhanced technical resources. “We are specialized in offering problem recovery plans, performance analysis, capacity management, high availability, OS upgrades, server migration, and application modernization services to our customers,” explains Martel.

The major strength of R2i lies in leveraging IBM’s power platform with their managed services. Being at the forefront of major technological innovations, IBM has developed PowerHA, a high availability solution that protects enterprises’ mission critical applications from planned and unplanned outages. R2i helps IBM PowerHA customers at architecture, analysis, implementation, management, and maintenance level. “We have partnered with IBM both locally and in labs for leveraging PowerHA,” says Martel. “We assist enterprises in deploying IBM PowerHA for High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) cost effectively,” he adds. Along with HA/DR, R2i also ensures that their customer’s valuable data is protected. “We offer tapeless back-up solutions and software or hardware replication for businesses,” articulates Martel.

R2i’s cloud managed services also help smaller enterprises to reap the benefits of virtualization, external storage, and highly available architecture at a fraction of cost. “Many SMBs are increasingly looking into our tailored cloud offerings to take advantage of the increasing processing capacity of IBM’s Power Systems” illustrates Martel.

To help organizations gain understanding about the expanded solutions for leveraging IBM power systems, R2i provides required technical support, which is necessary to run the business.

We assist enterprises in deploying IBM PowerHA for High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) cost effectively

“We play a major role for ensuring the success of various IBM projects,” shares Martel. The company continues to assist their global customers not only in determining the problems and resolutions but also help them invest in technical skills. For instance, one of R2i’s customers was required to integrate their business acquisitions into an ERP system while implementing a data warehouse solution. “The client needed to move off the old hardware, upgrade several applications and the OS release in order to accommodate the significant growth from the new acquisitions,” explains Martel. “Thorough testing of their external interfaces and implementing IBM Flash systems was the key to success,” he adds. Imagine having four full copies of production in a matter of hours, allowing for complete application testing and loading of the new data warehouse with no disruption to the business. To the delight of our customer only six months of rigorous work was required. R2i provided the management presentations, project management, and technical support to the customer. It’s all about feet on the ground and truly working alongside our wonderful customers.

Martel is determined to keep the innovation environment moving within R2i. His team regularly works on expanding their offerings around PowerHA tool kits, IASP, hardware and software replication, VIOS, tapeless back-up solutions.

In the coming years, R2i is aimed to enhance their skills in IBM power systems and storage to meet the customer requirements. “We envision staying agile for keeping pace with the ever changing and increasingly complex IT environment,” Martel states. “We are also extending our partnered network with other vendors to help our customers find new ways to remain competitive in present complex IT arena,” he concludes.