Established in 1978, DisChem started out as a small pharmacy in Mondeor, South of Johannesburg. Today, with close to 100 stores across the country, the DisChem Group is still privately owned and run by the original founders. Over the years the DisChem Group had actively sought to replicate the same model across all their stores, with each store’s IT infrastructure providing payment and loyalty point functionality, as well as administrative applications, inventory management, script verification and storage. DisChem attempted to build a cluster solution for availability with the individual servers and software applications in each store designed to support the necessary store functionality. However, this infrastructure was by no means ideal because if one of the servers failed, it could potentially bring down the entire store.