Banking on a virtual SAN

FOUNDED IN 1960, CreditPlus Bank is recognized through an online study as Germany’s best special bank for instalment loans. CreditPlus belongs to the Crédit Agricole Group, and with 54 million customers in 70 countries is one of the largest banks in Europe. With more than 500 employees CreditPlus has reached a new business volume with consumer credits of more than 1 billion Euros in 2010. Customer service is of the highest importance to CreditPlus, which is why 97% of its customers are very satisfied or satisfied.

Customer challenge
As CreditPlus grew as a financial institution so did their data storage requirements. Today, the computer network includes a large storage area network (SAN) with RAID mirroring which supports 150 VMware virtual machines running in a 24/7 production environment. For business continuity and security reasons the production environment runs in two data centres, several miles apart, each consisting of 40+ terabytes of storage.
The SAN, which they had acquired from a major storage provider and initially cost tens of thousands of dollars, was expensive to maintain and would soon require additional disk capacity in order to stay ahead of their rapid growth in storage requirements. CreditPlus consulted with their storage vendor and not only would the upgrade cost be high but also the expansion would require the SAN to be taken offline for a period of time. Downtime was not an option for CreditPlus, so it was imperative that an interim solution be found.

The solution
IT consultants, Stainczyk & Partner GmbH, performed a trial installation of SvSAN at one of the bank’s local branches. During the trial CreditPlus soon realized that the features and benefits of 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.
As the proof of concept was successful CreditPlus began calculating costs and comparing functionality against other solutions. In summary, they came to the conclusion that StorMagic was the only choice. Torsten Kurz (CISO and Head of Team IT-Infrastructure and Systems ) stated: “StorMagic’s SvSAN was the product which met all of our requirements in terms of functionality, performance, reliability and
cost effectiveness. Migration to SvSAN
for the entire production system was
realized within weeks without a second of downtime”.

The result
Once the SvSAN was active in the production environment, CreditPlus observed a substantial difference in performance when compared to the 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.
High availability for E.ON
The E.ON Group is the world’s largest private, investor-owned power and gas company with facilities across Europe, Russia, and North America. E.ON plays a leading role in the development of the renewable energy industry worldwide and has invested 7 billion Euros in renewable generation projects in the last five years.

Headquartered in Düsseldorf, the E.ON Climate & Renewables (EC&R) division is responsible for the global renewable activities. They currently operate over 4 GW of renewable capacity and will invest 7 billion Euros in renewables in the next five years. Today, E.ON is active in generating energy from onshore and offshore wind, biomass, photovoltaic and concentrated solar power.
Customer challenge
Uwe Fischer, Head of Asset Information Systems at EC&R, is tasked with delivering high availability to over 100 remote, renewable energy facilities across Europe. High storage acquisition and management costs, complex solutions and a lack of flexibility are just a few of the challenges Uwe faces trying to achieve high availability at E.ON’s remote sites. These challenges are amplified substantially by the isolated nature of E.ON’s renewable facilities. The locations include unmanned wind farms out at sea as well as biomass plants and solar farms located in very remote, rural areas.

“Potential downtime can take as long as six days to resolve because it requires locally-based IT in the effected country to acquire spares and travel to our remote facilities”, notes Uwe. “We needed to find the right solution to progressively manage our remote sites effectively and achieve high availability”.

Achieving High Availability at an expense
Uwe considered traditional physical shared storage solutions initially, however the acquisition and maintenance costs were astronomical. “High availability is essential for us to maintain continuity of operations at our remote sites”, explains Uwe. “However the extreme location challenges we face mean that physical shared storage solutions are prohibitively expensive for us to implement”.
Although physical SAN solutions would enable VMware high availability, the technology is a single point of failure in each facility’s infrastructure. If their storage went offline, it would result in downtime of the facility and E.ON would need to deploy IT resources to travel on site for resolution.

Searching for a centrally managed shared storage solution
E.ON needed to find a cost effective solution to leverage from the central office and not incur significant downtime issues. The deployment and management of each site needed to be a simple task. In addition, Uwe and his team needed to meet performance requirements in order to manage the workload of energy production applications.
Finding the right, flexible and cost-effective VSA solution
At this crucial point, Uwe was introduced to StorMagic’s SvSAN solution by StorMagic partner Joachim Stainczyk at Stainczyk & Partner GmbH. Unlike other solutions, SvSAN provided E.ON with the much needed shared storage for high availability. Plus, the unique flexibility and simplicity of the SvSAN solution met Uwe’s requirements to ensure rapid deployment and management of shared storage at each location. Joachim developed and implemented the proof of concept for E.ON and supported the remote rollout of SvSAN at each location. Joachim ensured the implementations did not involve any downtime or disruptions to service.

“StorMagic’s SvSAN enables us to cost effectively implement simple, 2-server highly available systems with minimal hardware requirements”, explains Uwe. “With VMware® and SvSAN at each location, we dramatically reduce the risk of downtime for energy-production applications and eliminate the need for on site support”.

The result
With SvSAN deployed, Uwe finally has the cost effective and flexible shared storage solution he needs to centrally manage E.ON’s remote sites. E.ON achieved VMware high availability at a fraction of the anticipated acquisition and management costs. SvSAN’s user-friendly design and vCentre integration enable E.ON to deploy and manage shared storage at each location quickly and easily from the central office. In addition, it is no longer necessary to have any IT staff physically located at each facility.

High availability and no single point of failure ensure these facilities are fully protected against potential downtime. Now Uwe and the EC&R team have the continuity required for renewable energy production.

Supermarket’s distributed IT
One of Europe’s largest supermarket chains had been searching for years for the right IT solution to enable its delivery of a superior customer shopping experience. It tried several solutions over the years, but the chain never fully realized its IT potential. Recently, the company discovered, bought and implemented SvSAN, a virtual SAN solution from StorMagic, and has realized a tremendous return on investment in a short time in production. It feels now it finally has the optimal solution in place for its distributed IT infrastructure.

Customer challenge
This supermarket chain has been in business for about 55 years, was the first company to open a supermarket in Italy, employs about 20,000 people today and has total annual revenues of about Ä6.8 billion. One of its many goals is to provide efficient and reliable services to customers in order to ensure the best possible shopping experience.

To deliver on this, it determined that it requires a technology infrastructure that is simple, efficient, fully redundant, flexible and cost-effective. This infrastructure has to be able to accommodate distributed IT services in various stores and provide reliability and high availability that ensure smooth running of operations. High performance is also crucial to support the needs of its various applications. In addition, its IT staff needs to be able to manage it in a centralized fashion, and have access to superior support when needed.
Back in 2006, the company began to explore and implement flexible and reliable IT services to build out its desired infrastructure. It entered into an agreement with VMware, purchased a bare minimum of hardware from HP to support the virtualization effort and began to virtualize its point-of-sale (POS) infrastructure. But at the beginning – and for a few years after – it found that its return on investment was limited because the only solutions certified by VMware to get the benefits of high availability and vMotion were made with a storage area network (SAN) and Fibre Channel (FC) protocol.

As new protocols were introduced, and VMware matured, the company noticed some small results improvements. But it discovered it had fundamental issues achieving its goals with VMware for two reasons. First, all of the chain’s tested and approved solutions had to be adapted because VMware was designed for a very different set of enterprise environments than its retail-oriented, remote-site nature. In addition, the company found that the SAN it purchased and deployed was oversized, unjustifiably complex and still a single point of failure.

Despite these challenges, the company pressed on because it knew it could do better and was confident it would find a solution on the market that would enable their success. Every three years, during technological reviews, IT employees devoted considerable amounts of time searching for and trying out virtual storage appliance (VSA) solutions available in the market.

They felt the type of load and the amount of disk space required to run their point-of-sale applications would be perfectly compatible with the capabilities provided by a single server X86 solution, and that a well-designed VSA could ensure full redundancy of all infrastructure without making it any more complicated.

Several VSAs were evaluated, such as those from vendors like LeftHand (now HP StoreVirtual), FalconStor and VMware, but the employees found that none of those solutions were able to deliver in their type of IT environment and produce results and benefits above and beyond its existing infrastructure solution. So the company chose to continue with its legacy solution, despite its shortcomings.
The solution
At the end of 2012, during the IT team’s latest search for new possible VSAs, it found StorMagic and SvSAN. They carefully evaluated the solution in its laboratories and were immediately convinced of its legitimacy and value. SvSAN enabled the team to implement the solution using only two servers. A centralized quorum eliminated the need for a third witness at each point of sale. SvSAN delivered a centralized management model leveraging integration with VMware vCentre to ensure the infrastructure would be simple and scalable enough for the company’s highly distributed environment. Also, deploying SvSAN was simple and automated, enabling IT staff to handle the job easily without involving any storage specialists. As a result, they chose to test SvSAN in 10 stores for a couple of months.

At the same time, the team negotiated with the company’s hardware suppliers to accommodate the new configuration the solution required and go from three devices (two servers and one SAN) to two – a significant hardware savings that SvSAN enables. After negotiations were complete, they produced a business case and proved to the chain’s CIO and CTO that they would see an immediate return on investment with SvSAN instead of its legacy solution. The new solution would enable the efficient, fully redundant, flexible and cost-effective environment the company required. The single-point-of-failure environment it had been operating in would be eliminated while satisfying design and operational goals and performing better than traditional hardware solutions. Centralized deployment and management of the entire infrastructure would be enabled, and updates integrated without any operational disruption.
In addition, within four years, the SvSAN solution and new hardware configuration would save the company one million euros due to lower purchase costs and energy savings. Based on these figures and the results from the in-store tests, approvals were quickly granted for the purchase and deployment of SvSAN across the chain’s infrastructure.

Deployment and integration
As of the end of October 2013, 30 of the chain’s stores have SvSAN in production and are served by the new IT infrastructure it enables. In 2014, 35 more stores will come online with SvSAN, and 35-40 more stores will go into production in each successive year. In the meantime, the company is using SSD technology in place of conventional disks to speed the adoption of StorMagic in other corporate IT environments. Additionally, the company is re-thinking how it delivers back-end storage for particular applications and use cases using software solutions instead of hardware.

For example, whenever it needs high performance (loads such as Oracle) spread across geographic locations or available storage in environments that it wants to isolate from its datacentre infrastructure, IT employees now deploy StorMagic’s SvSAN equipped with SSD disks.

This can be done instead of deploying much more expensive “traditional” solutions such as NetApp MetroCluster or other synchronous replication solutions between two traditional storage systems, as the company had been doing for years.
The first of these SvSAN/SSD deployments is now live, and supports the company’s meat packing operation. It has already delivered a six-fold improvement in application efficiency with no single point of failure in the environment, and is expected to also deliver these and additional results with the added benefit of consolidating four servers to two. This will allow the company to re-allocate dollars from purchasing additional servers to tackling other pressing business priorities.

Throughout the process, the company’s IT team has stated that StorMagic’s technical support is superior to other IT vendors and fantastic in all aspects. They even joke that they are sincerely grateful to StorMagic
for developing such a great software solution, because it will save them the physical labor that goes along with transporting and installing a SAN solution into the small space where their store datacentres are located.