Business Challenge
CreditPlus Bank AG was founded in 1960, operates as a specialized consumer credit bank and is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. A subsidiary of the French banking group Credit Agricole, which with 51 million customers is one of the largest banks in Europe, CreditPlus employs over 600 people.
Their physical SAN would soon require additional disk capacity in order to stay ahead of their rapid growth in storage requirements. This expansion would require the SAN to be taken offline for a period of time. As downtime was not an option for CreditPlus, it was imperative that an interim solution be found.
Solution
Following a trial installation of StorMagic’s SvSAN at one of the bank’s local branches, CreditPlus felt that SvSAN could be the interim solution they were looking for and decided to execute a proof of concept in a heavy I/O environment. During the proof of concept CreditPlus conducted extensive testing of data integrity and high availability in the event of system failures under these heavy I/O loads.
CreditPlus began calculating costs and comparing functionality against other solutions and came to the conclusion that StorMagic was the only choice.
Why StorMagic
Once SvSAN was active in the production environment, CreditPlus observed a substantial difference in performance when compared to their physical SAN, achieving a minimum increase in I/Os of 25%.
CreditPlus recognized that as an interim solution SvSAN was outperforming their physical SAN on all their applications and, as a result, CreditPlus concluded that SvSAN would remain as a permanent solution.
Technical Configuration
| Server Configuration | |
| SvSAN License | SvSAN Unlimited TB Gold |
| CPU | 1 socket, 4 cores per CPU |
| Memory | 32GB |
| Disks | 48 |
| Virtual Machines | 600 across 4 SvSAN production clusters
Majority are Linux Debien and SuSE Windows Server 2012 Citrix for thin client |
| Applications and IT Services | Oracle and Postgres databases
Email & back-office applications Web services Email – Lotus Notes on a separate all SSD SvSAN cluster ~500-600 mailboxes Tomcat + Apache for frontend web servers Bespoke in-house developed financial applications – most use a backend Oracle database |
Reliable
Designed for 100% uptime, minimizing disruption, keeping data secure, and protecting against disasters.
Simple
Create high availability clusters using any two x86 servers and ‘set and forget’ deployment and management.
Lower Cost
Lightweight architecture and flexible system requirements reduce hardware, software and operating costs.
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