Avia Service Stations in Switzerland Rely on DataCore

AVIA Osterwalder Zurich AG, an operator and supplier of AVIA gas stations in Switzerland, has deployed DataCore Corp.‘s storage virtualization software to improve its storage performance, simplify management and provide high-speed mirrored protection for its mission-critical applications.

These applications include the company’s core ERP application Microsoft Dynamics NAV plus its SQL Database and Exchange mail systems. With DataCore’s SANsymphony-V storage virtualization in place the company has added a new level of BC and HA at its main IT site and has put in place the infrastructure to support DR through additional replication capabilities to an outsourced data center.

“Our IT operations and critical business applications are exposed to constant change and growth demands, with the DataCore solution in place we not only have met our acute needs, but we have made a long-term investment that we believe is a strategic advantage,” said Christian Arragain, head of the computer science department, Osterwalder Zurich. “Without hesitation, we can say that everything promised with SANsymphony-V has been delivered.“

AVIA Osterwalder Zurich is a member of AVIA International, operating more than 3,000 AVIA petrol stations in 14 European countries. It operates over 120 petrol stations in Switzerland and needs to ensure the supply and flow of fuels be completed while maintaining high level of safety. Besides petroleum products for service stations Osterwalder Zurich supplies wholesale and retail customers with diesel fuel, lubricants, fuel oils and pellets.

ERP system core application to run the business
At Osterwalder Zurich, all IT services provided are centrally located. The heart of the IT operations is the ERP system, which manages orders, processing and delivery to gas stations and business clients. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is the basis of the ERP system implemented. While no downtime is tolerable, a failure in the winter months for business is almost unthinkable.

The company needed to increase its reliability and provide better protection for its central storage systems and the best way to do so was to establish a second data center remote from the site in Niederhasli (about twenty kilometers away from the main site). With two data centers, the company would have access to more capacity, higher performance and increased availability with a solution that could provide fast synchronous mirroring and a cost-effective solution for DR.

SANsymphony-V protects AVIA’s business and investments
In the central data center, SANsymphony-V runs on two standard IBM servers, in effect, transforming them into intelligent storage servers. These servers provision and supply both the internal and external storage capacity from arrays to application servers. Caching optimizes all workloads across all their storage to improve performance and application response times. Between the two redundant DataCore systems the data is synchronously mirrored at high-speeds. Continuous availability of operations is ensured through the auto failover and auto failback features of SANsymphony-V. In effect, the systems stay up and if one side fails it provides an automatic restart making the process non-disruptive to the critical business applications.

For their DR site AVIA Osterwalder Zurich has implemented automatic, asynchronous site replication using DataCore’s integrated Advanced Site Recovery feature over a WAN link. This link connects to an emergency data center for DR purposes. At this remote location, a VMware server and a DataCore storage server with internal storage capacity is operating on IBM hardware. The systems use asynchronous mirroring to replicate vital information between the sites. In case of a major emergency or site disaster, the data center, which is equipped with emergency generators, canbegin operating in a short time.

“The concept and our evaluation process with existing references convinced us that DataCore was the right solution. In addition to the HA and DR requirements, DataCore’s storage virtualization software provided a new level of flexibility and ease of management. Even more, the evaluation we conducted showed clearly that DataCore offered the best value for money, so we decided in favor of SANsymphony-V,” continued Arragain.