Pharmaceutical Firm Galenica Senese in Italy Chooses StorMagic SvSAN 

Tuscany-based Industria Farmaceutica Galenica Senese S.r.l. is a pharmaceutical production company that specializes in the production of infusional and injectable drugs, including loco-regional anesthetics; saline infusions; glucose; electrolytic; ringer; mannitol; glycerol and sodium bicarbonate to restore hydrosaline and energy levels for hospital patients.

It was looking for a new storage solution to manage data for its terminal server and Oracle databases which run in their pharmaceutical laboratory. This was a greenfield deployment, rather than a replacement of existing equipment.

The first challenge was creating a new environment from scratch; they were looking for a modern, hyperconverged solution that would reduce data management complexities. The second challenge was the shortage of servers, due to global supply issues relating to the Covid pandemic. Obtaining new servers might have taken months, and the company wanted to install the storage solution in their laboratory ASAP.

The end user consulted partner Silog Sistemi Logici S.r.l., who suggested they review hyperconverged solutions that could run on refurbished servers, to bypass excessive wait times. It reviewed HCI solutions from SAN Synology and StorMagic, both of which eliminate hard-to-find new hardware servers, to find the best fit for its needs.

“StorMagic SvSAN has allowed us to reduce CapEx by 50 %, since we didn’t have to purchase a traditional SAN or brand new servers to install and run it quickly. Additionally, we’ve increased uptime compared to more expensive, single-server alternatives. SvSAN is a perfect choice at the right price point backed by StorMagic’s excellent, responsive pre-sales and support team,” said Alessio Bolognesi, IT manager, Galenica Senese.

Silog Sistemi Logici recommended that the customer purchase refurbished HPE DL360 Gen9 servers with StorMagic SvSAN and Windows Server 2022 installed on them, to create a compact, highly available, hyperconverged failover cluster. The customer agreed and was able to install in less than 1 month, reduce their costs and increase uptime.

Hyperconverged SvSAN was superior to a classic server with storage system. It is helping the customer simplify management, increase scalability, and occupies less space in the small pharmaceutical laboratory. It has been able to reduce costs, improve energy efficiency and was easy to install and use.

The refurbished HPE servers running SvSAN provide a highly available environment for the Empower chromatography data system (CDS) from Waters Corporation. This application is a management system for High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). The infrastructure is based on a standard TCP/IP network, where the instruments are connected directly to the servers. Users interface with the system via the Empower application server, where analyses are conducted. The failover cluster created by SvSAN ensures that Empower remains online with no disruption, allowing for uninterrupted production.

Server configuration (per server)

“Our main objective was to get our laboratory’s storage solution up and running as quickly as possible. Our partners, Silog Sistemi Logici and Ready Informatica, suggested that we explore HCI solutions on refurbished servers to avoid the long wait times for hardware, which have become common in the Covid era. We followed their advice, and in less than thirty days, our lab was fully equipped with a highly available SvSAN failover cluster that met all of our needs without any hassle – or any wait time,” said Bolognesi.

Time savings using refurbished servers
The customer was able to install the system in less than 1 month thanks to the use of refurbished servers. This eliminated the long delays in global supply chain post Covid. SvSAN runs on any 2 x86 servers – existing or new – and the models don’t even have to match.

50% Capex reduction
Using SvSAN has saved Galenica Senese 50% in Capex costs compared to expensive hardware associated with traditional physical SANs. The customer also noted it is affordable overall compared to VMware’s vSAN HCI solution.

Increase in uptime
By choosing a hyperconverged SvSAN solution, the user has been happy with the high availability offered by SvSAN, compared to their previous single-server configuration, which presented a single point of failure.

More about StorMagic SvSAN