Published On: 13th December 20223.6 min readTags: , , , , ,

About Galenica Senese

Tuscany-based Industria Farmaceutica Galenica Senese is a pharmaceutical production company that specializes in the production of infusional and injectable drugs, including loco-regional anesthetics; saline infusions; glucose; electrolytic; ringer; mannitol; glycerol and sodium bicarbonate to restore hydrosaline and energy levels for hospital patients.

Business Challenge:

The company was looking for a new storage solution to manage data for its terminal server and Oracle databases which run in their pharmaceutical laboratory. This was a greenfield deployment, rather than a replacement of existing equipment.

The first challenge was creating a new environment from scratch; they were looking for a  modern, hyperconverged solution that would reduce data management complexities. The second challenge was the shortage of servers, due to global supply issues relating to the COVID pandemic. Obtaining new servers might have taken months, and the company wanted to install the storage solution in their laboratory as soon as possible.

They consulted trusted partner Silog Sistemi Logici, who suggested they review hyperconverged solutions that could run on refurbished servers, to bypass excessive wait times. Galenica Senese reviewed HCI solutions from SAN Synology and StorMagic, both of which could effectively eliminate hard-to-find new hardware servers, to find the best fit for their needs.

Solution:

Silog Sistemi Logici recommended that the customer purchase refurbished HPE DL360 Gen9 servers with SvSAN and Windows Server 2022 installed on them, to create a compact, highly available, hyperconverged failover cluster. The customer agreed and was able to install in less than one month, reduce their costs and increase uptime.

StorMagic’s hyperconverged SvSAN was far superior to a classic server with storage system. It is helping the customer simplify management, increase scalability, and occupies less space in the small pharmaceutical laboratory. They’ve been able to reduce costs, improve energy efficiency and loved that it was so easy to install and use.

Today, the refurbished HPE servers running SvSAN provide a highly available environment for the Empower chromatography data system (CDS) from Waters Corporation. This application is a management system for High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). The infrastructure is based on a standard TCP/IP network, where the instruments are connected directly to the servers. Users interface with the system via the Empower application server, where analyses are conducted. The failover cluster created by SvSAN ensures that Empower remains online with no disruption, allowing for uninterrupted production.

Why StorMagic:

  • Time Savings Using Refurbished Servers: The customer was able to install the system in less than a month thanks to the use of refurbished servers. This eliminated the long delays in global supply chain post COVID. SvSAN runs on any two x86 servers – existing or new – and the models don’t even have to match.
  • 50% CapEx reduction: Using SvSAN has saved Galenica Senese 50% in CapEx costs compared to expensive hardware associated with traditional physical SANs. The customer also noted that SvSAN is extremely affordable overall compared to VMware’s vSAN HCI solution.
  • Increase in Uptime – By choosing a hyperconverged SvSAN solution, Galenica Senese has been extremely happy with the high availability offered by SvSAN, compared to their previous single-server configuration, which presented a single point of failure.

Technical Configuration

Server Configuration (Per Server)

Servers Refurbished HPE DL360 Gen9 servers
CPU 2 x CPU, 8 core per CPU
Memory 128GB
Storage Capacity 1.5TB
Disk Configuration NVMe RAID-1 (Mirroring), with hot spare disks
Networking 1GbE
Hypervisor Microsoft Hyper-V
Applications Waters Corporation Empower CDS and Oracle databases
Guest VM Operating Systems Windows Server 2022, Mikrotik RouterOS
Data Protection Acronis Cyber Protect Backup

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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