Business Challenge:
Witholz is a modern production and service company, specializing in timber construction, and the production of wooden beams. The manufacturer delivers everything from one-off bespoke orders to mass produced wood, and a variety of related joinery components, all from a single source.
Witholz GmbH previously used a physical SAN, an HPE MSA 2040 high-performance storage array, for data processing and management in its two datacenters. The company urgently needed a solution that provided high availability to store application data from its entire IT environment, including: ERP, CAD file, CRM, SQL, file services and remote desktop systems.
Their primary goals were to modernize and virtualize the environment to add high availability and boost performance in a single solution that provided compute, storage and networking. They wanted to install the solution in two datacenters to ensure their key criteria – high availability.
Solution:
After reviewing all of the market options, Witholz found that StorMagic SvSAN stood apart from the competition because it was very easy to install and use, and offered the highest performance for the price. StorMagic’s integration with VMware vSphere checked another important requirement for the customer, who preferred the vSphere hypervisor platform.
The SvSAN implementation was recommended and installed by Witholz’s trusted partner, it@business GmbH & Co. KG. Today, the customer is using HPE servers, vSphere and SvSAN in two of its datacenters. The cost and management headaches of a physical SAN have been eliminated, and SvSAN is now managing and processing all of Witholz’s IT data, while keeping it available 24×7.
Why StorMagic:
- Modern Replacement for Physical SANs: StorMagic SvSAN was designed to be as simple and lightweight as possible, while delivering everything needed to eliminate hardware-dependent SANs and downtime, while adding high performance and high availability at one to thousands of locations.
- High Availability: With SvSAN, data is written to two SvSAN VSA nodes to ensure service uptime, and write operations only complete once acknowledged on both SvSAN VSAs. In the event of a failure, applications are failed over to other available resources to ensure continuous uptime.
- High Performance: SvSAN provides granular, historical I/O transaction, throughput and latency statistics for each volume. This is delivered through a simple, intuitive GUI with minimum, maximum, and average values for daily, monthly, yearly time periods.
Technical Configuration
Server Configuration (Per Server)
| SvSAN License | 6TB Gold |
| Servers | HPE DL385 |
| CPU | AMD Epyc 3 GHz |
| Memory | 2x 256GB |
| Storage | 6TB |
| Disk Configuration | All flash |
| Networking | 10 Gbit/s |
| Hypervisor | VMware vSphere |
| Guest VM Operating Systems | 15 (all VMs in the company) |
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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