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Viterra Informationssysteme GmbH The Business Viterra is one of the leading real estate companies in Germany and the market leader in regards to buying, leasing and selling residential properties. The residential building core business is managed by the subsidiaries Viterra Wohnen in the Ruhr area, Viterra Rhein-Main in the Rhine-Main region, with Deutschbau responsible for the rest of Germany for the Viterra apartment holdings. At present the real estate company offers some 165,000 apartments for rent or purchase by private customers. The focus of the recently established subsidiary Viterra Development is on the construction of office buildings and owner-occupied apartments. Viterra is a growth-oriented real estate company, with its headquarters in Essen, Germany, which generated sales revenue of some ¤ 1.2 billion in 2002. Viterra currently employs approximately 2,700 employees. For additional information see www.viterra.com. The Challenge As early as 1999, Viterra implemented a Storage Area Network (SAN) based purely on a hardware storage platform. Due to the unfavorable cost structure and the lack of flexibility of the hardware-focussed solution, Viterra finally decided to reorganise its storage environment and to switch to a software-based storage management platform. In view of the increasing pressure to contain costs and the rising requirements of return on IT investments, the new storage management platform was primarily intended to achieve a clear and long-term reduction in the high operating costs, optimised utilisation of existing resources and central and simplified storage management. In addition, the solution had to allow for the establishment and expansion of a vendor-independent storage infrastructure through an open technology approach, thus enabling the flexibility to meet the challenges of changing storage requirements in the future. The Solution During the selection process the DataCore product, SANsymphony™, proved to be a convincing solution owing to its cost effectiveness and openness, leading Viterra to select it as their storage management software. When Viterra's comprehensive storage consolidation project is completed, SANsymphony will allocate storage capacity centrally and, in some cases, automatically from the SAN to company-critical applications such as Oracle, Lotus Notes, GIS and File-Print-Services. The application servers run heterogeneous operating systems including Sun Solaris, Windows NT/2000, Novell and Linux. In total, the system manages two terabyte of storage based on RAID storage subsystems from IBM, EMC and Compaq. Viterra is planning to implement optimization of their backup strategy through integration with SANsymphony's Snapshot function this year. Through the release and more efficient use of existing storage resources enabled by deploying SANsymphony and its centralised management capabilities, the company benefits from direct savings in asset and storage-related operating costs. Interview with Markus Zabel, Network Manager at Viterra Informationssysteme GmbH: What problems were you hoping to solve with your SAN? Four years ago we decided to implement a SAN. At that time our objective was to solve the problems resulting from the continuously increasing demand for storage space using innovative technology to implement a long-term solution. We got a grip on most of the technical issues through implementing the SAN so that our next step was to reduce the high total cost of ownership and management. Ultimately we were able to identify that we could significantly reduce these costs through the implementation of the DataCore virtualisation technology. Why did you choose a DataCore-solution? What alternative solutions did you consider? We were particularly convinced, by both SANsymphony's vendor independent and open technical approach and the return on investment that SANsymphony would deliver. Furthermore, we could see that we would be able to protect the investments we had made in existing storage resources through more efficient utilisation and re-deployment. In addition, we now have the strategic advantage of being able to select server and storage systems irrespective of the manufacturer, completely basing our decision on our specific requirements. And finally, we expect to gain a high level of future proofing, as SANsymphony offers many options for scaling up to meet future growth in the environment. Right through the selection process we also considered deploying a SAN-based on solutions from a well-known storage vendor. Despite our positive experience with this reliable technology, we decided not to adopt this solution because of the hardware limitations it imposed and the higher price. Describe your environment and how you are using SANsymphony. SANsymphony manages the provision of storage to business-critical applications such as Oracle, Lotus Notes, GIS (Geographic Information System), and File-Print services, which run on our Solaris and Windows NT/2000, Netware and Linux servers. These applications are allocated 'storage on demand' from a virtual storage pool based on physical storage subsystems from IBM, EMC and Compaq. We utilise Brocade fabric switches within the SAN infrastructure. Within this environment we are currently managing approximately 2 TB of storage allocated to the various application servers through SANsymphony's drag and drop user interface. We are in the process of a large consolidation project, which, once completed, we expect to result in SANsymphony managing some 3 TB of data. What do you see as the advantages offered by the SANsymphony solution? With SANsymphony, we can reduce our operating costs significantly, since the centralized management delivers efficiencies that ensure these costs are far below the costs of isolated heterogeneous hardware solutions. SANsymphony also leads to reduce effort on the part of administrators and simplifies the management of our storage environment. We estimate that we will be able to significantly reduce the operating costs for storage management every year and, furthermore, we have realised additional savings due to the continued and more efficient use of existing storage resources. Further benefits are the high level of availability of the systems based alternate path technology and the comprehensive support services offered by DataCore. Finally, DataCore's storage management solution provides us with increased flexibility in the design and operation of our storage infrastructure in the future.
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