Teufel Software GmbH has implemented Tintri VMstore for hosting virtualised SAP environments, with impressive ROI.
The Tintri solution was implemented to improve operational efficiency that could not be sustained with Teufel’s previous storage solution. Performance problems created by legacy storage unsuitable for a virtualised environment led to overprovisioning to keep up with user demand, which increased capital and operational costs and resulted in poor storage resource utilisation.
With Tintri, Teufel improved database responsiveness with a 70 percent drop in latency and reduced the storage footprint by 80 percent. The company also improved administrator productivity by reducing the provisioning time for SAP environments with VM-aware functionality.
“The latency of existing disk-based storage solutions from NetApp and EMC provided inconsistent performance and caused unreliable user experience,” said Buelent Cira, network and system administrator at Teufel. “We needed a solution that provided flash performance and consistent latency to meet our SLAs. The LUN and volume-based storage made administering the virtual environment complex. Tasks such as provisioning, cloning, backing up and restoring at VM level were overly complex and required elaborate orchestration between multiple applications. We wanted a storage system that natively understood VMs.”
Tintri’s VM-aware storage and cost-effective flash-based performance allows Teufel to meet the performance demands of mission-critical hosted SAP workloads. Native integration between Tintri and VMware, fast and easy VM provisioning, per-VM snapshots and per-VM clones have increased administrative efficiency and reduced administrative overhead. Tintri also helps Teufel dramatically reduce the storage footprint, which increases operational efficiency and provides considerable savings in power and cooling costs. What used to take 16 rack units to accommodate Teufel’s performance needs now takes only three rack units.
“For a business like Teufel that hosts mission-critical SAP environments, fulfilling its strict service-level agreements depends on fast, reliable and manageable storage”, said Marcus Chambers, Tintri Vice President & GM EMEA. “In a fully virtualised SAP environment old generation storage is not going to provide the required level of efficiency – in fact it creates more problems which generate higher costs. What is needed is storage that has been completely redefined to operate in the virtual environment and uses the constructs of virtualisation - in short, VM-aware storage.”