German Euronics Implements IBM XIV Storage System

Euronics, a large German buying group in consumer electronics, implemented the IBM XIV Storage System to achieve their four goals of reliability, flexibility, performance, and ease of use.

Euronics has two thousand dealers in Germany. Euronics values quality, speed and flexibility for their customers. Their IT must have the flexibility to meet the demands of their dealers and their departments.

Ulrich Muller, IT Manager, Euronics, said:
"Euronics is a national organization the largest German buying group in consumer electronics. And we have two thousand dealers in Germany our first aim is quality for our customers. Speed and flexibility are the main topics of our company. The IT must have the flexibility to meet the demands of our dealers and our departments. The biggest problem for us was having three different storage systems and we had big problems with our stability, reliability of the systems and that’s the reason why we decided to buy one big storage solution that covers all our requirements.
"We have four goals reliability, flexibility, performance, and ease of use. The key word is flexibility.
"Everything is changing in IT. We have daily changes in this environment and if a dealer or department wants more storage space, now I am able to do it. It’s a basic. The storage is a basic form of virtualization. We use VMware as a virtualization platform in the inter environment. And we use Power VM in the power environment and we are able to meet the demands of our departments and our dealers in very short response times and that is very important to us.
"We need storage, a piece of storage, additional storage and with the XIV its very easy. You only have to know how many, you configure it and it’s over. You never mind about RAID sets, hot spots, or things like that. It’s so easy.
"We are running XIV now for ten months without any problems. Nothing. No downtime. It’s a basic request because reliability is most important factor for us.
"We are running a lot of applications on this platform, SAP. SAP is no problem on an XIV. We are running Microsoft SQL Server, a lot of infrastructure systems. I think the most important message is we are running it with a good performance."

Maik Hahnel, IT Architect at Fritz & Macziol, IBM partner, said:
"The XIV came in and was presented by IBM sales representative. He showed the customers what the IBM XIV can do and for the customers it sounds like a miracle that the box can script everything over everything and you don’t have to create RAID arrays and the data is being mirrored and the reboot times are about five minutes.
"Euronics has a competitive advance because they can react much faster through the flexibility the IBM XIV provides.
"The more systems working with the IBM XIV the more the IBM XIV is performing. It scales with more systems and in a virtualized environment this is very very important."

Michael Bucher, Storage Database Administrator, Euronics, said:
"It makes it easier. We have more time for the users here. More time for new projects and so it’s much easier to work.
"Since we started using the XIV we have two thirds less latency and three times more throughput.
"The IBM XIV system is able to deal with all the requirements we had from that’s now the most important thing to us. We know its reliable, performance, and ease of use. Therefore it was the right decision."