German Manufacturer of Pedicure Products Eduard Gerlach Deploying Open-E DSS V7

Open-E, Inc., a developer of storage software, announced an implementation of the Open-E DSS V7 active-active cluster solution for Eduard Gerlach GmbH from Germany, a pedicure products supplier with its brands Gehwohl and Gerlach Technik.

The challenge which Eduard Gerlach to confront was their SAP system, which was designed for about 150 users from external data centers.

“The company started to seek for a modern and high-performing storage platform, especially focused on HA and easy scalability, as their SAP environment was to be in-sourced. The main requirement was to meet the crucial system standards of SAP: a solution certified by VMware, including storage capacity as well as five years of 24/7 support. Open-E DSS V7 was the best solution for them“, mentioned Krzysztof Franek, CEO and president, Open-E.

The whole project was assigned to Open-E’s partner, ComputerCentrum GmbH. They proposed a solution that consists of Open-E DSS V7 software on the latest Proliant Generation 9 servers from HP – both certified by VMware, Inc. to meet the requirements of SAP.

“The customer was convinced by the solution,” added Franek. “It was the possibility of setting up an active-active iSCSI cluster with VMware certified software and HP VMware Hypervisor (Essentials Plus) that was the determined for their choice.”

ComputerCentrum set up a HA environment with 10GbE technology, together with powerful server and network components. The solution was split into two server rooms in different fire protection zones.

Additionally, in the meantime of the consulting process, the company decided to set up consistent storage centralization for the SAP environment, updated on a new database and re-located the data center. What is more, a multi-stage backup concept was implemented, which ensures a simplified restore process in case of a sudden data loss, and at the same time it increases the overall security of the whole storage system.

Jens Nentwich, IT manager, Eduard Gerlach, admits: “Storage centralization is a sensitive topic for every company. In our case, compatibility with our existing SAP database was a must – apart from easy scalability, HA and best performance. With the new storage solution based on Open-E DSS V7 we were able to meet all requirements, benefit from additional security with 24/7 support and didn’t have to wear out our budget. All in all, we are completely happy with our new solution.“

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