Business Challenge
CITA is a division of Luxembourg Roads & Bridges (Ponts et Chaussées Luxembourg), and manages traffic control data for Luxembourg’s highways and tunnels. The IT team is responsible for managing the data coming in from the field IoT (Internet of Things) systems including vehicle counting, weather information, traffic and tunnel management and control, and video surveillance captured by more than 600 cameras on Luxembourg highways. The organization’s traffic management system communicates with highway equipment to inform drivers of events impacting their local roads. High availability is mission critical because if communications are lost at any point, the tunnels may be closed. Multiple IT services like DNS and back office tools are in place to manage and streamline a complete network of data being collected from multiple sources.
The equipment initially deployed was two EMC VNX 5300’s with active/passive mirroring and VMWare SRM (Site Recovery Manager). After three years of frustration with frequent reconfigurations, performance issues and excessive time and human resources spent managing this system, they wanted to migrate to a simple, active/active solution to eliminate complexity and worry surrounding disaster recovery drills caused by failures and downtime. CITA consulted Telkea ICT, one of Luxembourg’s leading IT and telecom service integrators, for direction on a new environment. Telkea recommended they remove VMware SRM, and identified an active/active solution that could easily scale to meet future needs, at a much lower cost.
Solution
CITA refreshed their two datacenters with SvSAN on Dell and HPE servers stretched across the two sites in a metro cluster, which provides data mirroring with the ability to automatically failover if one side of the cluster becomes lost or unavailable. SvSAN creates a highly available hyperconverged cluster between two servers (one at each site) and additional compute only servers access the shared storage through an iSCSI target. This environment supports all applications for CITA and the entire solution is deduped and backed up using Veeam software to a third datacenter to a Synology NAS.
Why StorMagic
- High Availability: The customer’s mission-critical data must reside on a highly available system to eliminate highway congestion caused by tunnel closures.
- Ease of Management: CITA reports that the SvSAN cluster is ten times easier to manage and requires less IT resource than their previous solution.
- Reduced Hardware Costs: The SvSAN solution is 50 percent less expensive and requires significantly less hardware than CITA’s previous active/passive solution.
Technical Configuration
Server Configuration (Per Server)
| SvSAN License | SvSAN Unlimited TB Platinum |
| Hardware | Dell and HPE |
| CPU | Two sockets with 16 cores per CPU |
| Memory | 256GB |
| Storage | More than 5TB |
| Networking | Two networking cards: 1x dual 10Gb, 1x 4Gb interfaces |
| Hypervisor | VMware ESXi 6.5 with vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition |
| Applications | Traffic management software, video surveillance software, back office applications and web services |
| Data Protection | Veeam backup and replication with deduplication |
Simple
Provides a true ‘set and forget’ solution for any environment using centralized deployment and management – whether for thousands of sites or just one.
Cost-Effective
Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
Flexible
Delivers on today’s performance needs leveraging any CPU and storage type whilst avoiding over-provisioning with the confidence of scaling for tomorrow’s demands.
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