DataCore Virtual SAN Solution Brings BC and Hyperconvergence to Lerg

DataCore Software Corporation have implemented the its Virtual SAN software as part of a hyper-converged data center solution at LERG S.A., a major European chemical plant based in Poland.

Through implementation of a software-defined infrastructure, the chemical manufacturer is benefiting from HA data protection, enhanced BC and improved productivity whilst reducing storage-related expenses by 50% and improving performance by more than 500%.

“The hyper-converged mirrored data center running DataCore Virtual SAN software has enabled us to set up a multi-site BC process which delivered improved performance and far greater productivity. The new infrastructure also provides greater flexibility with high level of investment protection for our future.” Adam Bek, financial director, LERG S.A.

Headquartered in Pustków (Poland), LERG has nearly 500 employees with annual revenues of over €100 million supplying customers across 25 countries around the world, producing and exporting resins and their chemical by-products for their use in a wide range of applications in various industries. The company has grown steadily in recent years, as has the need to rapidly respond to requests from the expanding customer base. Other business challenges include maintaining the high quality level of products as well as meeting a variety of EU regulatory requirements, which were challenging the flexibility, reliability and performance of the existing IT systems.

When the existing hardware reached end of life, LERG’s IT service provider and DataCore partner Komtech Sp. z o.o. introduced the benefits of a hyper-converged data center solution provided by hyper-converged Virtual SAN software.

The solution Komtech proposed offered HA with automated failover that would be stretch clustered between two data centers but with a price point so low that LERG originally envisaged that that level of budget would be needed just to achieve offline replication.

Komtech achieved this low costing proposal by providing consolidation savings, achieved by replacing five hardware systems including an external storage array with a single HP Proliant server with internal HDDs at each data center site. By reducing the hardware footprint from 5 to 2 systems running hyper-converged Virtual SAN, LERG was also able to use the savings to add SSDs directly into the servers. On this reduced hardware platform thanks to the power of software, VMware ESXi 6.0 delivers VMs for Windows applications like Exchange, Web, Domain or File Services as well as supporting their more critical Linux-based ERP systems which use Oracle data bases.

The hyper-converged Virtual SAN software adds enterprise storage services including synchronous mirroring with auto failover for HA and support for BC across the ‘stretched’ VMware clusters in an active-active configuration, both providing capacity as well as performance to the production systems. The DataCore Virtual SAN integrates high speed caching and auto-tiering to improve the performance on the underlying HDDs and flash-based SSD capacity in a central shared pool of storage.

In the back office, administration of the entire system is under one single management console making it easier for LERG’s IT staff to be more productive. Provisioning new VMs therefore becomes a click and it is non-disruptive, as are maintenance tasks, which can be planned, coordinated and performed by simply switching between nodes, meaning that no system downtime is needed. The hardware and platform independence of the DataCore solution maximizes purchasing power and investment protection and it allows more cost-effective capacity growth and performance whenever needed.

“In comparison to alternative concepts which were just a refresh, the Komtech’s solution based on DataCore resulted not only in new equipment that was more productive but for a similar price – we were also able to modernize the IT architecture, consolidate to fewer systems and add more functionality and performance,” concluded Adam Bek.

Benefits in overview:

• Multi-site BC with higher reliability/availability
• Faster performance for improved analysis and calculations, too time-consuming before
• Performing maintenance without the need to disrupt the business
• Consolidation savings from fewer physical machines, reduced power consumption and heat output
• Flexible hardware choice and more buying power DataCore reduced storage-related spending/investments by 50%:
• DataCore delivered more than 5x performance improvements.
  

Case study