JULABO GmbH is one of the foremost providers of high-quality, reliable and high-performance “Made in Germany” temperature control solutions for high-tech industries. The company recently chose the DataCore SANsymphony™ software-defined storage platform to support its flexible virtual infrastructure, to ensure business continuity and high performance of VMware vSphere virtual machines synchronized across German and U.S. data centers.
With 10 branch offices on three continents and more than 400 employees, the central IT team provides support for Microsoft Dynamics ERP and other business-critical applications. JULABO was faced with the need to move data between its remote sites and to headquarters, while also supporting rapid growth and new business requirements in its local markets. Growing workloads caused increased demand for high availability and greater flexibility, prompting it to implement a comprehensive virtual infrastructure across the entire organization.
DataCore partner and system integrator Leitwerk AG was commissioned to implement DataCore SANsymphony on the main site. Today JULABO maintains mirrored computer centers in two different sites, protected with various fire compartments, as well as a third computer center located to support off-site storage of backups. All systems are virtualized, with workloads running across 170 virtual machines on redundantly designed VMware ESX servers on HP Proliant hardware, each with 768 GB RAM and 16 cores. The sites are connected via a high-performance fibre channel network.
“
Hardware solutions were not able to achieve
the DataCore performance results and value, even
with twice the number of spindles
“
JULABO estimates that using DataCore has resulted in:
- A five-fold increase in performance.
- Storage-related costs were reduced by 50%.
- Storage-related failures were reduced by 90%.
- Time input for routine administrative tasks was reduced by 90%.
- Planned downtime (data migrations, upgrades, updates) was reduced by over 95%.
- DataCore has managed to convert 50% unused storage space into free storage capacity.
“The entire project was carried out at the same cost as what would we would have paid for storage alone if we had chosen a major storage hardware provider,” said Jürgen Jonescheit, CIO JULABO GmbH.
“Hardware solutions were not able to achieve the DataCore performance results and value, even with twice the number of spindles,” Jonescheit added.
For more information, please see the case study
