Founded in 1968, F. Dufresne Inc. specializes in the distribution of petroleum products. It is the owner of the Quebec chain of Eko service stations and Transports Norcité and has more than 200 employees.

In addition to its role in day-to-day business management, the IT infrastructure must ensure that a loyalty card system named MilliPleins operates smoothly. This card allows customers who pay for gas at an Eko service station to accumulate millilitres of gasoline that can be redeemed later.The challenge was to provide the loyal MilliPleins card customers with uninterrupted access to the service. This means that, regardless of the time of day or night, the customer must be able to accumulate or claim millilitres of gasoline using his/her card. This requires constant IT presence irrespective of scheduled or unexpected downtime of the company’s main server.

This is where RealSynch takes over. By mirroring the data on a server installed in another location than that of the company’s main server, it ensures that even if the main server crashes, the backup server can maintain operations until the main server is able to return to service.

This backup server system enables F. Dufresne Inc. to provide its loyalty card service at any time of day or night, without the user ever being aware of times when the main server is shut down for maintenance. This reliability instils in customers a feeling of trust in the company.

RealSynch is greatly appreciated within the company, as attested by Jean Bourgault, Director of IT at F. Dufresne: “RealSynch is very reliable. It makes a very sparing use of the production server’s machine time, and transfer between the two sites is essentially instantaneous, despite an ADSL Internet connection. We are very proud of the product and the result obtained. At Dufresne, 200 000 to 300 000 file records are transferred every day without any problems.


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ROBOVER – Division of MORNEAU-TTI INC.

Robover began business in 1955 and specializes in the sale and distribution of sealed glass units, which it supplies to various door and window manufacturers. It currently has more than 100 employees. As its production operation is expanding rapidly, its IT system has become indispensable, and reliability is an increasingly critical concern.

The consequences of IT downtime for Robover are slowdown or stoppage of production, delivery problems, order failures and interruptions in the production of orders destined for assembly-line robots. The entire manufacturing cycle depends on an IT system that is operating properly at all times.

As way of assuring good value for dollar, RealSynch buttresses the security of Robover’s IT operations through a backup server system that is always ready to carry out the transactions left unperformed as the result of downtime on the main production server. In addition, the production data are backed up in real time on the backup server, thus enabling us to recover all our business’s data should the main server ever suffer a major breakdown.

Aside from stability and efficiency, what impressed Robover about the RealSynch solution is its simplicity and inexpensive purchase price and operating cost. As Mr. Bernard Lavoie noted, “RealSynch is really easy to operate and very practical. It’s simple to configure and most importantly, it offers outstanding return on our investment.”


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Active in North America, Europe and Asia, Cascades specializes in manufacturing and marketing packaging products, tissue papers and fine papers, composed mainly of recycled fibres. Since the start of business more than 40 years ago, Cascades has grown and expanded its operations continuously, all the while respecting its employees and fostering community-based activities in those places where it has set up its facilities. Its priorities are quality, technological development and protection of the environment.

A company of this stature thus required optimal management of its IT resources. Given the scale of its operations, server downtime could have extremely serious consequences. As all its factory robots receive their instructions directly from the server, server downtime would completely paralyze production. Furthermore, as company shares are traded on the Toronto stock market, a server crash could have catastrophic financial repercussions on trading.

Implementation of RealSynch has fulfilled many of the business’s IT system needs, ensuring not only that the main server’s data is backed up in real time on an exterior backup server but also meets the stock market’s financial security and reliability requirements. Thus, even if the main server were to crash, mill operations would not be interrupted and share trading could continue on as before.


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