Swiss Pharmaceutical Manufacturer Trusts DataCore’s SANsymphony-V to Implement and Scale Out Its Virtual Infrastructure
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., February 19, 2014 — Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer, Legacy Pharmaceuticals, trusted DataCore Software’s SANsymphony-V to implement and scale out its virtual infrastructure to support the introduction of their critical ERP system based on IFS and Oracle databases. The software-defined virtual infrastructure is based on DataCore for storage virtualization and VMware for server virtualization. DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, provided higher performance and availability as compared to all other evaluated alternatives. The total cost, including what was required for a redundant SAN hardware and software design, was around 60 percent lower than the price of alternative non-redundant single SAN systems.
“DataCore SANsymphony-V gave us more flexibility and scalability than a hardware SAN and was able to meet our high availability and performance requirements perfectly. Not only did we gain a redundant SAN architecture, but we achieved a 40 percent savings in the initial investment in comparison to conventional hardware SAN solutions and now we can adjust our storage infrastructure to meet our requirements without having any storage vendor lock-in,” said Sascha Fritz, IT Expert at Legacy Pharmaceuticals Switzerland.
As a leading company in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, Legacy Pharmaceuticals is committed to the highest quality and safety standards mandated by the Swiss regulatory and supervisory authority and have specific compliance requirements and remedies, which are regularly audited.
The compliance guidelines, required by the state as well as those established based on voluntary standards, must also fit within the practical bounds of economic feasibility in regards to the information technology that is implemented. The need for compliance, cost-effectiveness and innovative IT productivity are key competitive advantages to maintain leadership in the industry. For these reasons, Legacy Pharmaceuticals decided to implement a new IT infrastructure and ERP validated system according to the latest Good Automated Manufacturing Practice (GAMP) 5 guidelines. GAMP is a standard framework for the validation of computerized systems within the pharmaceutical industry. However, for the ERP system with IFS, the older AS400 environment with NetApp storage without full redundancy, were no longer suitable.
“Therefore our IT environment had to be upgraded. In cooperation with the IT service provider Steffen Informatik, we decided to go with a virtual infrastructure and put our ERP system on virtual machines running on VMware,” continued Sascha Fritz.
At the same time, a new storage solution with appropriate availability and performance needed to be found. The SAN solutions offered by NetApp, EMC and HP that were evaluated did not allow a fully redundant environment within budget. Finally, virtualization experts from IT system house Steffen Informatik presented DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization software that provided sophisticated enterprise storage features and using standard industry storage components.
SANsymphony-V virtualizes storage resources regardless of manufacturer or model and provisions virtual disks to physical and virtual servers, and mirrors them synchronously to achieve high-availably between any two DataCore powered x86 based servers. The storage management for all resources in the infrastructure can be centralized, made flexible and automated. Furthermore, DataCore integrates seamlessly into the VMware server management systems.
The flexibility of DataCore allowed for the existing NetApp systems to be easily integrated, but instead they were replaced due to their high continuing maintenance costs.
The new DataCore and VMware based software-defined virtual infrastructure was preconfigured by Steffen Informatik and installed in parallel to the old solution. Then the subsequent migration of physical servers to virtual machines took place gradually. The new IFS ERP system with all the components for production, development and test systems, including the underlying Oracle databases and MS Exchange, MS SQL, domain server and print services were transferred to the virtual environment. In addition, the Citrix XenApp environment used for virtualization of applications on thin clients was set up to run on the high-availability DataCore storage.
“The project was managed by our staff and by Steffen Informatik who were very competent and efficient. Importantly they were able to implement the GAMP 5-validation successfully. Compared to the previous solution, we now have a virtual infrastructure that combines VMware and DataCore as a highly flexible and thus more economical platform to meet our needs. DataCore SANsymphony-V enabled greater performance and higher availability at a cost point that other solutions could not equal or provide. We are very satisfied,“ concluded Sascha Fritz.
About Legacy Pharmaceuticals
Legacy Pharmaceuticals Switzerland GmbH manufactures licenses and markets pharmaceutical products in over 70 countries worldwide. The Legacy based in Birsfelden / Basel is a specialized manufacturer of semi-solid and liquid and powder aseptically manufactured pharmaceutical products. For about 50 years, traditional drugs, animal plasma products and lyophilization products (bulk lyophilization) were prepared. Also, the production of sterile packaging is one of the core competencies of Legacy Pharmaceuticals. In addition, services for product development, pharmaceutical analysis and drug tests etc. are offered. www.legacypharmaceuticals.com.
About Steffen Informatik AG
As one of the leading IT service providers in Switzerland we are the partner of choice for SMEs and wholesale customers for infrastructure, cloud and business solutions. Our services range from consulting to implementation and operation of complete IT infrastructures. Our customers benefit from our expertise and commitment as well as the highest partner status from leading manufacturers. Steffen Informatik was founded in 1989 and is still run by the owner. Hundreds of customers in all regions of Switzerland supported by more than 120 qualified employees in four locations. More information on www.steffeninf.ch
About DataCore Software
DataCore is a leader in software-defined storage. The company’s storage virtualization software empowers organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore’s adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture. Visit https://www.datacore.com or call (877) 780-5111 for more information.
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