Increased Performance for Supply Chain Ingram Micro

About the Company

Ingram Micro Inc. is the largest global wholesale provider of technology products and supply chain management services. The company operates in 36 countries with approximately 600 employees in IT functions

project Background

Ingram Micro has developed a distributed application for automated volume licensing. The backend database platform for this application is DB2 running on IBM OS/390, and the Sun Solaris application servers use Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) containers. The application servers and the database are hosted at two different locations. The application software performs many OLTP functions requiring numerous database transactions.

In order to access the data stored in DB2, Ingram Micro had been using a type 3 JDBC middleware product. Because this product incorporates a gateway, performance is limited, a bottleneck is easily created and a potential single point of failure exists.

Product Functionality

After looking at several solutions to improve performance for their distributed applications, Ingram Micro chose Syniti’s JDBC/DB2 type 4 middleware. Syniti’s type 4 middleware offers direct connectivity and high performance. Using Syniti’s driver, Ingram is now able to suc- cessfully deploy Java applications.

Syniti’s JDBC/DB2 is a 100% Pure Java type 4 middleware solution for DB2 SQL access from custom applications and third party products. Syniti’s JDBC/DB2 accepts standard Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) function calls, translates these into native DB2 SQL for high-performance, and communicates with the DB2 server to retrieve, update, and insert DB2 data.

Results

Ingram Micro’s decision to use Syniti’s JDBC/DB2 came down to three factors: improved performance, improved reliability, and reduced management costs.

• 100% Pure Java JDBC level 3 type 4 middleware
• Direct-connect/nogateway High performance and increased functionality (SSL v3 security)
• Easy administration