Published On: 1st June 20202.3 min readTags: , ,

Business Challenge

RWE Renewables is the newest subsidiary of the RWE Group, a German-based multinational energy company, and is one of the world leaders in renewables. With around 3,500 employees, it is one of the world’s largest generators of offshore wind power, and is Europe’s third largest for all renewable energy. As such, the RWE Renewables IT team is tasked with delivering high availability to over 100 remote, renewable energy facilities across Europe, such as unmanned wind farms out at sea and biomass plants and solar farms in very remote rural areas. This task was made more challenging by high storage acquisition and management costs, complex solutions and a lack of flexibility.

Their objectives for a solution were that it should be:

  • Cost-effective
  • Able to be leveraged from their central office
  • Highly available – should not incur significant downtime issues
  • Simple – deployment and management at each facility should be a simple task
  • Able to meet performance requirements – to manage the workload of energy production applications.

Solution

RWE Renewables considered physical SAN solutions which would enable their VMware high availability but the solution would become a single point of failure in each facility’s infrastructure. Given the remote and difficult to access locations, this could take up to six days to fix. RWE Renewables found StorMagic’s SvSAN solution was the only solution which met all of these requirements.

“High availability is essential for us to maintain continuity of operations at our remote sites”, explains RWE Renewables Head of Information Systems, Uwe Fischer. “However the extreme location challenges we face mean that physical shared storage solutions are prohibitively expensive for us to implement”.

Why StorMagic

Following the successful implementation of SvSAN, RWE Renewables achieved VMware high availability at a fraction of the acquisition and management cost. SvSAN’s user-friendly design and vCenter integration enabled RWE Renewables to deploy and manage shared storage at each location quickly and easily from their central office. RWE Renewables cost-effectively implemented the 2-server high availability solution, and with VMware and SvSAN at each facility, they dramatically reduced the risk of downtime for energy production applications, and the need for on-site support.

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