INDUSTRY

Prominent Building Supply Wholesaler Realizes Better Response and Performance Benefits Through Centralized Storage Management: DataCore Software today announced that German customer J.N.Kobig Inc., a prominent building and garden supply wholesaler, is realizing significant business benefits by relying on DataCore's virtualization software SANmelody to consolidate many individual storage devices and enhance overall utilization through shared usage of its hard disk storage resources. The wholesaler Kobig chose DataCore to add flexibility and storage services to its Storage Area Network (SAN), enabling centralized administration for productivity and in order to simplify the provisioning and allocation of its constantly increasing amount of data storage. Through SANmelody, Kobig is able to maintain management control of its storage resources from its data center in Mainz, as well as all of the affiliated locations. In addition to centralized management, the software added a new level of high availability protection and reliability for its data assets. The SAN, powered by SANmelody, supports a comprehensive line of about 250,000 household and landscaping products as well as data for over 70,000 customers. This growing data had to be managed cost effectively along with storage intensive applications and services, such as those for bath design and planning systems. In the field of enterprise resource planning (ERP), Kobig had already transferred its data to Fibre Channel (FC) storage, but the networking and consolidation of the individual storage devices and the joint usage of the storage were not possible without major impacts. Without SANmelody, the planned, gradual migration of further applications into the SAN would have worsened the already poor performance of the system. Furthermore, Kobig needed to improve the reliability by adding redundancy and high availability mirroring to protect critical applications, especially its ERP systems. "We used dedicated disk storage systems, which increased our cost for storage capacity," explained Reiner Ihrig, Head of IT at Kobig. "This is why we were looking for another way to free us from the hardware lock-in. But we still wanted to use our existing storage resources." Kobig had already embraced the virtualization of servers via VMware, courtesy of its system vendor Kramer & Crew. It was this solution provider that recommended the open storage platform SANmelody from DataCore as an uncomplicated, low priced solution, offering simple administration, hardware independence and addressing Kobig's need for storage consolidation. Deployed on a standard server from any Intel AMD based manufacturer, the SANmelody software virtualizes, manages and pools data capacity, as well as providing powerful storage services that work over both Ethernet networks using iSCSI protocols and FC networking - thus providing flexibility and alternatives for the future. The SANmelody disk server is able to provide the application servers needed storage capacity when required, regardless of the particular operating system (it supports Linux, Netware, MacOS, UNIX, Windows, etc.). In order to create a highly available, high-performance system, two redundant disk servers supporting failover were established. The storage is accessible through a second data path via the second server - ensuring that the access to data storage is maintained continuously in case one system fails. The two SANmelody disk servers work together, taking over both the control and allocation of storage capacity in the SAN. They coordinate all processes centrally and consolidate all available storage capacities in the system in a virtual pool - administering them centrally either with Fibre Channel (as is the case currently) or with the lower-priced iSCSI protocol. This solution also permits a remarkable level of performance acceleration, which Kobig needed urgently due to the low performance it saw on its UNIX systems. Thanks to DataCore's caching algorithms, the data throughput was improved considerably. As a result, the performance of the UNIX systems was enhanced, making it possible to meet their objectives. "We are very satisfied with the higher availability of storage and the very flexible sharing and allocation of storage," described Ihrig. "The administration of IT as well as storage allocations and provisioning can now be handled much faster and with less manpower. With SANmelody we are no longer hardware constrained and can manage different operating system platforms without additional investment." Restructuring its backup data and migration of the ERP systems into the SAN will be the next major steps at Kobig. The planned migration will utilize the snapshot and SANmotion capabilities of SANmelody. Disk-to-disk snapshot backups will be paramount to Kobig - so that the enterprise can safeguard the data at any time. Along with this major migration effort, which is currently being tested in the test SAN, SANmotion - an additional SANmelody tool that enables the quick and safe transfer of productive data - will be put to use.