GAMING

DataCore Software announced today that Bitburger Group, one of Germany's largest Beer brewers has implemented a high-availability storage architecture based on SANsymphony. A storage solution without a single point of failure: this was what Bitburger Brewery required. At the same time, the new storage solution had to provide greater flexibility and speed so that it could support crucial SAP R/3 and other production applications in an optimal manner. In cooperation with system integrator Kramer & Crew GmbH, the Bitburger Brewery gained performance, increased utilization and mirrored its two new Hitachi Thunder Arrays into a fully redundant system by adding DataCore's powerful storage management and virtualization software - SANsymphony. Uwe Siller, the manager of the IT Department at the Bitburger Group, developed the strategy and plan to upgrade the company's IT environment. "We wanted to implement a fail-safe architecture and system, therefore a highly available storage solution was an absolute necessity to meet the requirement". In the past, the storage system achieved only 97% operational up-time. "This was too low," says Siller. In terms of performance, Bitburger needed and saw a noticeable speed up of their complex SAP R/3 workloads. "When the real-time operation of the systems started in October, the users were delighted. They saw response times reduced by five percent or more". Bitburger Group workloads have grown recently due to two recent acquisitions. To gain productivity, it was decided that all business-critical applications would be consolidated into the central data processing system at Bitburger headquarters. When real-time system production started in October, some 300 users needed to have direct access to the SAP applications. Starting in January 2005, other applications (plus those from the new acquisitions) of the Bitburger Group would have to be consolidated as well. At this point, approximately 500 employees have access and use of the data stored on the Bitburger storage arrays, at the same time. This is almost double the previous work load. Due to the integration of the new subsidiaries, the growth rate in volume of data being stored has dramatically increased. "Previously we expected a growth rate of fifteen to twenty percent a year; now we are assuming growth of 25 percent plus", explains Siller. The Bitburger Group now faces the future without worries. "Our systems are now operational at 99.8 percent, a considerably better value than before" says IT Manager Siller enthusiastically. Due to the systems being fully mirrored under SANsymphony, failures are almost impossible. "Only logical errors within SAP R/3 might prevent the contents of the mirrored systems from being useful. For this reason, we carry out daily data backup in addition to mirroring," explains Siller. In addition to higher availability and faster response times, the system brought many more advantages to the users. Storage administration has been greatly facilitated as well. The SANsymphony virtualization solution allows storage space to be allocated to applications without any reconfiguration of hardware or downtime being required. If the storage requirements of an application increase, the Virtual Capacity auto-provisioning function automatically assigns more storage space - no intervention in storage hardware is necessary. The software performs all necessary functions. Uwe Siller summarizes: "Our new storage solution has no single point of failure. According to our measurements, it serves SAP R/3 users at a speed five percent better than the legacy systems. Due to the flexibility of network mirrors being implemented across the storage network by DataCore SANsymphony, availability has increased significantly. In the event of an error, no failures of the business-critical applications are expected since we mirror the hard disk systems in combination with doing regular backups. We also now enjoy much more flexible administration of our storage capacity and we are realizing significantly better utilization of our storage assets through added automation." For more information, visit: http://www.datacore.com/case_studies/casestudies_home.asp .