BUHLMANN GRUPPE achieves faster application performance

BUHLMANN GRUPPE, a leader in steel piping and fittings, headquartered in Bremen, Germany, has implemented a storage management and virtual SAN infrastructure based on DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software. SANsymphony-V manages and optimises the use of both the conventional spinning disks (i.e. “SAS” drives) and the newly integrated flash memory-based Fusion-io ioDrives through DataCore’s automatic tiering and caching technology. With the new DataCore solution in place, the physical servers; the VMware virtual servers and most importantly, the critical applications needed to run the business – including Navision ERP software, Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint – are now failsafe and run faster.
As the company grew, the performance and availability of the legacy IT systems in place were unable to meet the amplifying business requirements of BUHLMANN; so a new solution was sought.

"What is important for us, is that our systems maintain the highest levels of availability and performance at the best price and that we have the portability and flexibility we need to grow,” states Marco Niebur, Director of IT at BUHLMANN GRUPPE. “Our IT landscape is constantly evolving to match the growth of the company, therefore we knew we needed to look for a flexible, vendor-independent solution to meet our storage needs and that is what we found with DataCore. Flexibility, hardware independence and great value for the money made the decision easy to go for the DataCore solution.”

Fusion-io optimized for high-availability and performance with DataCore SANsymphony-V
In combination with the virtualisation experts from DataCore’s authorised and trained partner, pco (Personal Computer Organization), the new software-defined infrastructure was configured, installed and integrated within two days. SANsymphony-V was installed on two HP Proliant servers, connected to six HP 2700 disk enclosures, housing 150 SAS disk drives, providing 46 TB of capacity to each site. To increase performance, each server was also equipped with a Fusion-io ioDrive Duo card with 640 GB capacity. The Flash Accelerator memory card, combined with DataCore, doubled the data throughput compared to conventional solid state disks (SSDs).

"In order to economically implement a high availability and high performance system to meet our requirements, we used the Fusion-io cards combined with the powerful features of SANsymphony-V,” explains Mr. Niebur. “High-speed mirroring and auto failover ensure the highest levels of availability. The thin provisioning feature improved our utilization by allowing us to free up previously reserved space, so that we can now use all our capacity more flexibly and efficiently. The need for spare capacity and the need to buy more disk space is significantly lower and thus we reduce our costs. By using DataCore’s auto-tiering and adaptive caching, the more expensive, faster flash memory based resources are effectively used across all the disks – so that the amount needed can be considerably smaller and therefore more cost-effective."

DataCore and Fusion-io = Turbo Acceleration for Tier 1 applications
After successfully testing of the implementation, the migration of the physical and virtual servers onto the DataCore powered SAN was carried out. A number of physical servers, the Microsoft SQL and Exchange system and other file servers now access the high performance DataCore storage environment. In addition, DataCore now manages, protects and boosts the performance for storage serving 70 virtual machines under VMware vSphere that host business critical applications – including the ERP system from Navision, Easy Archive, Easy xBase, Microsoft SharePoint and BA software.

"The response times of our mission-critical Tier 1 applications have improved significantly; performance has been doubled by the use of DataCore and Fusion-io," says Mr. Niebur. "The hardware vendor independence provides storage purchasing flexibility. Other benefits include the higher utilization of disk space, the performance of flash based hardware, as well as faster response times to meet business needs that we experience today – and in the future. Combined, they save us time and money. Even with the new purchases involved, we have realised saving of 50 percent in costs compared to a traditional SAN solution."