Reference
BÖ-LA Screen printing technology GmbH
IT-HAUS bringt mit Azure Local Rechenzentrum bei BÖ-LA auf Hochtouren
High-availability infrastructure environments are often very complex. Their administration and maintenance is a challenge, especially for companies with a small IT team. With hyperconverged solutions from Microsoft, IT-HAUS helps medium-sized companies such as BÖ-LA to modernize their data center cost-effectively - for minimum administration effort with maximum performance.
Added value for the customer
Hardware
Software
"The solution implemented by IT-HAUS has not only met our expectations, but significantly exceeded them. Since we have the new system, the previous problems with performance are a thing of the past. What used to take longer and cause significant losses for everyone is now completed within a few minutes, without any noticeable delays."
The challenge
BÖ-LA, a long-standing IT-HAUS customer, previously used a classic server infrastructure as a high-availability solution with shared storage, synchronous mirroring, transparent failover and auto-tiering.
Auto-tiering is an intelligent mechanism that permanently moves data to the appropriate storage class depending on the frequency of access. However, if more extensive database queries are made and the data is not in the fast storage tier, this can have a negative impact on performance.
The company network was also already operating at the limits of its capacity, resulting in frequent delays and the risk of data loss. The storage system was sometimes so overloaded by the movement of large volumes of data, e.g. when installing virtual systems or copying virtual data carriers, that employees were no longer able to save their Office documents.
In addition, the administration and maintenance of the highly complex system proved to be costly and time-consuming for the in-house IT department, meaning that important tasks such as firmware updates for the storage system inevitably had to be reduced to the bare essentials.
A new data center concept needed to simplify the management of the environment and ensure that future capacity and performance requirements could be met even at peak times. In order to gain an overview of current solutions, the customer contacted IT-HAUS.
The IT-HAUS solution
IT-HAUS used Live Optics to explore the options for a cost-efficient renewal of the existing data center. The hardware- and platform-independent software collects key performance indicators such as data throughput, free and used capacity and memory utilization. Live Optics then creates a detailed analysis of the server computing loads and capacity requirements, which IT-HAUS uses to design a tailor-made configuration for the customer. The sizing of the hardware was based on a life cycle of five years and the data growth forecast for this period.
Mit einer besonders einfach zu administrierenden Lösung überzeugte IT‑HAUS die Verantwortlichen: Anstelle des herkömmlichen 3-Tier-Ansatzes, der die drei Ebenen Rechnervirtualisierung, Storage und Netzwerk über separate Hardware-Systemen realisiert, wurde diesmal mit Azure Local aus dem Hause Microsoft eine hyperkonvergente Infrastruktur (Hyperconverged Infrastructure, kurz: HCI) gewählt. Dabei handelt es sich, anders als der Name „Azure“ vermuten lässt, um eine On-Premise-Lösung. Diese konsolidiert alle drei Bereiche in einem einzigen System – einem horizontal wie vertikal skalierbaren Vier-Node-Cluster, der über eine zentrale grafische Benutzeroberfläche bereitgestellt und betrieben wird. Hierfür kommt die bereits in Windows Server 2019 integrierte Software Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) von Microsoft zum Einsatz, die ohne zusätzliche Lizenz genutzt werden kann.
The advantage: hardware and software are precisely matched and tested to guarantee maximum compatibility - the customer saves on acquisition and performance costs. This means that single storage type configurations such as all-NVMe or all-SSD can be implemented comparatively cheaply and offer the customer 20 to 30 times higher performance than the previous solution.
Thanks to integrated high availability, there is no data loss, even if several servers in the network fail. With just six height units per fire compartment, the compact system also saves a lot of power and waste heat.
In addition to the installation during operation, IT-HAUS also took over the migration of all data so that the new system could be handed over to the customer "turnkey" after just a few days.
A 24×7 support contract for five years guarantees that BÖ-LA can contact the manufacturer around the clock, 365 days a year. The response time is a maximum of four hours; defective hardware is replaced on the next working day at the latest.
Another part of the project was the renewal of the data backup: In future, an HPE ProLiant DL385 Gen10 Plus will be used as a backup server and Veeam software for a backup-to-disk-to-tape strategy.
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