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German Drinking Water Supplier Hochsauerlandwasser Consolidates Storage Environment

With Open-E failover cluster

Open-E, Inc., a developer of storage software used for building and managing NAS and SAN storage environments, introduced a new customer case in cooperation with German partner IT-Schulte.

Open-E,Hochsauerlandwasser

Hochsauerlandwasser GmbH, a joint communal drinking water supplier for the German cities Meschede, Olsberg and Bestwig, manages both drinking water supply and sewerage for about 59,400 citizens in a service area of approx. 400 km2.

As the company’s existing storage network was already six years old and not secured against downtimes, they assigned the project to their long-time partner IT-Schulte who suggested implementing a scalable HA cluster environment.

To ensure HA, scalability and flexibility of the new storage solution, IT-Schulte decided to use a virtualized infrastructure based on vSphere 5 and Open-E DSS V7 storage software, running on storage systems by TAROX AG. Both virtualized servers consist of Intel Xeon E5 series dual socket systems with Intel server technology and high RAM capacity as well as 10GbE interface cards for the connection to the existing network and the SAN infrastructure.

In case of hardware failures or maintenance, downtimes can be reduced to a minimum by using VMware HA. In the back-end, mirrored storage systems in an Open-E Failover Cluster based on TAROX hardware were implemented as a HA iSCSI SAN. The storage systems also include 10GbE cards to connect the systems with each other, as well as with the virtualized servers.

Hochsauerlandwasser runs two servers with Open-E DSS V7 as an iSCSI failover cluster in active-active mode and two VMware ESX hosts on TAROX hardware. As a supplier of both drinking water and sewage disposal, the company’s requirements for accessibility and availability are extremely high. This was solved by integrating extensive USV and air conditioning. The connection of all systems is based on 1Gb / 10Gb network cards and copper-based switches for redundancy.

Sebastian Ruf, system administrator, Hochsauerlandwasser, said: “Apart from its flexibility, I was convinced by high stability of the Open-E servers. In case of hardware failures the storage continues to run without interruption and even after power outages the system can be easily rebooted by using standard servers. We don’t even have problems in regards to spare parts as we’re not forced to use any specific SAN disk drives.

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