The City of Heidelberg, located on the Neckar River and home to around 160,000 residents, was first officially mentioned in 1196. Today, this historic city attracts approximately 13.9 million visitors each year. With its charming Old Town, impressive castle, and vibrant cultural scene, Heidelberg offers a unique environment.
IT Challenge
Just before the turn of the millennium in 2000, the City of Heidelberg conducted a comprehensive review of its entire IT infrastructure. The city needed to manage the growing demands for digital services across its various departments, all while ensuring 24/7 reliable IT operations.
One of the core challenges was handling the increasing volume of data. The existing approach using direct-attached storage (DAS) was no longer suitable for these requirements. A more flexible, pooled storage solution was needed to meet the demand for high availability, avoid capacity silos, and provide greater flexibility. The goal was to create a dynamic storage pool that would only use the actual storage needed for data, with the ability to add capacity as required.
In addition to that, faster response times were expected from the storage, while still making use of existing systems for cost-effectiveness and sustainability. The primary operating system in use was Novell Netware, but many specialized applications running on other operating systems also had to be supported.
Die Lösung
To address these needs, the City of Heidelberg evaluated various storage solutions and found that block-based SAN storage was far more flexible than network-attached storage (NAS) in supporting their applications. This led to an in-depth examination of several SAN technology vendors.
One solution stood out: SANsymphony by DataCore, a revolutionary approach to storage virtualization. After a six-month testing period, the solution was thoroughly reviewed, and SANsymphony was selected. SANsymphony allowed the city to continue using its existing storage systems. It also provided the highly sought-after high availability and transparent failover, which ensured uninterrupted operations even if a storage system failed completely.
Additionally, patented acceleration technologies built into SANsymphony delivered significant performance improvements. The solution created a flexible storage pool that could be dynamically adjusted, with thin provisioning allowing unused capacity to be presented and added as needed.
The initial setup included two SANsymphony servers in separate rooms within City Hall. The existing storage systems were connected to these servers. The resulting storage pool, which provided a range of data services, initially held just over 100 GB of data.
Results
- 100% availability over 25 years
- Over 5 generations of storage hardware exchanged without disruption
- 3 data center relocations carried out with no interruption to operations
- Significant reductions in RPO and RTO, thanks to CDP
- Positioned securely for the future
25 Years of City Development
In a world where change is inevitable, Heidelberg has continually adapted and evolved. Over the past 25 years, the city’s population has grown by more than 10%, and the digital transformation in the public sector has led to new and increasing demands on IT. The city’s data volume has skyrocketed — expanding more than 3,000 times to around 350 TB.
With this tremendous data growth and the introduction of new applications, the original IT facilities became insufficient. The City of Heidelberg had to relocate its IT infrastructure to a new space within City Hall. The relocation was seamlessly executed with no disruption to daily operations.
Years later, for the same reasons, another IT move was necessary, and once again, everything was completed smoothly, with no noticeable impact on end users. The system remained fully operational throughout several hardware failures over the years, thanks to SANsymphony’s resilience.
Redundancies were continually added to ensure high availability, including a major shift in 2022 when an IT room was moved to a second location several kilometers away. This was done through a high-performance network ring, ensuring constant, synchronous IT services and data availability.
At the same time, the city’s aging storage systems were gradually replaced, with full data migration included in each transition. To date, the city has worked with five generations of storage systems from various manufacturers, consistently expanding capacity. Currently, the city uses storage solutions from Dell, Fujitsu, and Huawei. In addition, the City of Heidelberg runs a separate backup installation for regular data backups, using Veeam.
The integration of SANsymphony into Veeam has shortened backup times in their VMware environment. Continuous data protection (CDP) has become a core part of the city’s backup strategy, reducing recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) significantly.
Technical Highlights
- SANsymphony as a storage virtualization solution
- for diverse storage systems from multiple manufacturers
- Data provisioning for hundreds of specialized applications across more than 30 departments
- Server virtualization using Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi
- CDP integrated into the backup strategy High availability architecture across two data
- centers with a four-fold 32 Gbit/s FC fabric in a ring network, spanning distances of 7.4 and 9.6 km
- Hardware RAID for additional protection against individual disk failures
- Planning for the construction of a third data center (synchronous or asynchronous connectivity
City of Heidelberg
Heidelberg is a modern city with a rich historical heritage. Situated along the Neckar River, it draws millions of visitors each year with its renowned Old Town, Heidelberg Castle, and Germany’s oldest university.
The city offers an array of cultural attractions, including museums, theaters, festivals, and concerts. The region, nestled between the Rhine Valley and the Odenwald hills, is also a haven for outdoor activities.
Heidelberg’s blend of tradition and innovation makes it a central hub for science and research. It offers a high quality of life, with an open-minded atmosphere and an inspiring environment for both residents and visitors.
