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Business Solutions Powered by DataCore™  Stadt Heidelberg (City of Heidelberg) is a large local municipal administration serving the community of Heidelberg and its more than 139,000 residents. Situated on the banks of the River Neckar in Germany, Heidelberg is famous for its historic and beautiful setting, but, like any modern local authority, it also has a duty to provide reliable and high quality services to the local population. This duty brings with it a complex and growing IT infrastructure and ever increasing amounts of data. With a requirement to service 1200 clients with 19 centralised servers, Stadt Heidelberg recognised a need to address the issues of managing storage resource allocation.
The Challenge Typical of many organisations' needs, Stadt Heidelberg faces numerous challenges in delivering the service levels the users demand. These challenges include server downtime caused by storage issues, the seemingly never ending growth of data requiring constant expansion of storage capacity, widely distributed storage resources and, as a result, backup operations spread over many locations with a shrinking window for performing them. The organisation realised that they needed to adopt a different approach to the allocation and management of storage if this situation was not to become untenable. Manfred Leutz, deputy IT Manager of Stadt Heidelberg comments: "We had many key requirements from our storage solution such as improving application data availability and security, increasing utilisation of storage whilst reducing backup times. All of this needed to be achieved cost effectively and with a view to as yet unknown future requirements." The Solution DataCore's partner CEMA AG proposed a solution based around the use of two SANsymphony storage domain servers, the SANsymphony Snapshot component, Dell servers, Dell storage and Gadzoox Cappellix switches. In addition to deploying virtual storage allocation, Stadt Heidelberg have, by exploiting SANsymphony Network Mirroring, implemented a cost effective remote site solution ensuring that their data is mirrored between two locations using reliable but relatively inexpensive storage devices. User access to data is guaranteed across both sites without implementing complex and resource hungry distributed security systems. Manfred Leutz concludes: "SANsymphony has proved to be the high performance solution we had hoped for and met all the data availability requirements demanded by our tests. Through the integration work carried out by CEMA we now have a flexible and secure platform on which to base our current and future storage needs." How did you learn about DataCore? We learned about DataCore and SANsymphony through CEMA, a DataCore partner in Germany. CEMA recommended the solution as a means for solving our problems. How many other solutions were considered? How long was the selection process? We considered one other SAN-solution and various individual point solutions for specific problems before selecting SANsymphony. The selection process, including the time taken to establish the need to address the various individual problems with a single SAN-wide solution, took approximately 7 months. Why did you choose a DataCore solution? SANsymphony provides a flexible, storage hardware independent solution. It is also largely independent from the operating system environment requiring no special drivers on the application servers. This makes implementation of the solution possible with minimum disruption to live application services. Additionally, SANsymphony provides a cost effective solution to the storage management issues we were experiencing by enabling us to benefit from advanced features whilst deploying relatively low cost components. What is your hardware environment? We are currently using DELL servers in our environment, PowerEdge 2400 for the SANsymphony storage domain servers and PowerEdge 2550 for application servers. We will also be installing a Fujitsu Siemens Primergy machine in the near future. The SAN infrastructure consists of 2 Gadzoox Capellix 2000F fibre channel switches and we use QLogic QLA 2202F host bus adapters. The storage pool used by SANsymphony is provided by a Dell Powervault 660F fibre channel array. What are you doing with your SAN? What are you managing? SANsymphony is being used to consolidate storage and to serve virtual storage volumes to five application servers. Three of these are running Netware 5.0, the other two are running Windows 2000, one hosting Microsoft Exchange and the other an Oracle database. Do you have any plans for further use of DataCore products? We have a need to provide a backup solution that has less impact on live applications. To achieve this, we have tested the integration of SANsymphony Snapshot with our existing Backup Exec environment. With CEMA we have proved that by serving the snapshot image to the backup server directly, the data can be backed up without using application server processing cycles and with only minimal interruption to on-line services. We intend to roll this fully automated solution into the production environment in the near future.
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