Credit Management Firm Lowell Deploys Datadobi

Lowell Service Center GmbH, a division of Lowell, one of Europe’s largest credit management companies, has employed Datadobi, Inc.‘s DobiMigrate to move its primary production and secondary DR data centers to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model, utilizing the MSP Vodafone Group Plc.

The Lowell Service Center’s goal was to leverage Vodafone’s cloud-based infrastructure resources to build and manage its storage and overall IT infrastructure. As a result, the center would still be able to control its own data, without having to physically manage it on-site. In addition, by utilizing Vodafone’s IaaS, it would have the flexibility to purchase just the storage and server resources they required to support current business and IT initiatives, without the necessity of having to buy, build, and manage the entire infrastructure on-site. Vodafone’s IaaS services and elasticity would save the Lowell Service Center a great deal of management time and also significant budget as well, especially in terms of the cost avoidance related to new hardware and software licenses.

The critical challenge became, how best to migrate all of its data – 1,000 servers and 100TB, which were stored across its primary production data center in Essen, and its DR data center in Gelsenkirchen – to the Frankfurt-based Vodafone data centers.

“Our initial goal was to migrate 64TB of warm archive data and 35TB of production data from our main data center to Frankfurt. It was critical that the solution we chose be able to verify that all of the contextual and relational information remain intact and was not be changed in any way. For instance, retention time absolutely couldn’t be altered,” said Martin Gregor, lead engineer technical services DACH, Lowell Service Center. “As most data management professionals understand, a warm data transfer can be very difficult. But, for both business and regulatory compliance reasons, this wasn’t an area in which there could be any level of compromise.“

Gregor was already familiar with Datadobi’s enterprise NAS migration software, DobiMigrate, and trusted it, having used it at a previous employer for data migrations between both national and international data centers. However, in order to comply with due diligence practices he also reviewed competitors. The comparison confirmed what he knew, Datadobi would enable his organization to transition to its new storage environment at a far superior price.

Gregor and his team were able to migrate 100TB of data in under 8 weeks. Since that time, they have been replicating deltas every 24 hours from the primary data center to Frankfurt.

“Bottom line, we were able to enjoy a fast and significant ROI because of Datadobi,” he concluded. “DobiMigrate enabled a streamlined migration to the Vodafone IaaS data centers. And, now that we don’t have to worry about day-to-day IT infrastructure management in our previous onsite production and DR data centers, we can focus our professional team on strategic business activities, such as bringing products and services to market more quickly, and enhancing the customer experience.“

The next step, currently underway, is to employ DobiMigrate to move data from other various smaller data centers spread across Germany, to the new data centers in Frankfurt.