Wisniowski in Poland Deploys DataCore SANsymphony-V

DataCore
Software Corporation announced that Wisniowski Company has deployed a high
availability and high performance, virtualized storage infrastructure with DataCore SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor software to
ensure uninterrupted access to manufacturing data.

“Thanks to DataCore’s SANsymphony-V software
our production is more efficient,” states Tomasz Kosecki, manager of
IT Department at Wisniowski. “The
malfunction of a disk array no longer disrupts operations or causes a stoppage
of the whole company. Now we have additional time to react in critical
situations, which positively influences our stress levels and greatly improves
our comfort with our systems. Best of all, we can prevent many problems from
impacting our users and customers.“

Wisniowski Company is a manufacturing enterprise that must
react rapidly to constantly changing customer needs. To assure agility in a
competitive market, the company has implemented a computerized,
large-scale, manufacturing process for its products, which include high-quality
garage and industrial doors, fence systems and aluminum joinery. Now
SANsymphony-V’s synchronous data mirroring across sites ensures high
availability and delivers performance for Wiśniowski Company.

Six
administrators in Wisniowski Company’s
IT Department oversee the entire network infrastructure, the data center and
over 330 workstations. Efficient IT operations are critical, since all
manufacturing processes are digital and the flow of data from the central
database drives all operations. Not only are these administrators responsible
for day-to-day operations, but they must be able to respond quickly to any
failure of the company’s computers, storage, servers and network
infrastructure.

“We have to ensure the highest level of
safeguards and uninterrupted availability of the data for our core production
systems, which are stored within disk arrays located in the main data center,“
says Kosecki. “We cannot afford
downtime or data disruptions that impact daily production; relying on a backup
copy made the previous night is not a practical option.“

The company
enlisted the help of Quad Pro, a solution provider in Krakow,
to investigate storage virtualization solutions to improve data reliability and
availability. “We wanted to avoid
downtime in case of failure of a single disk array as well as significantly
improve our ability to deal with natural disasters like fire, flooding or
building collapse,” says Kosecki.

Over a
month-long test period, using actual production data in a set of servers
provided by Quad Pro, it became apparent that despite the IT team’s concerns
about the performance and efficiency of a software solution, the DataCore
storage hypervisor was a smarter choice than any hardware solution.

“We knew that virtualization does not always
offer the required performance,” explains Kosecki. “So we requested a number of proof-of-concept
tests, which clearly demonstrated the advantages of DataCore’s solution in many
areas all at once. The introduction of the DataCore virtual layer not only
improved performance, availability and management efficiency, it was also more
cost-effective than competing hardware-based solutions.“

DataCore’s
SANsymphony-V storage hypervisor was installed on two physical servers running
the Windows 2008 Server R2 operating system. All data is located and stored on
EMC CX3 and CX4 disk arrays connected via Fibre Channel. According to Mr.
Kosecki, installation was easy and trouble-free.

To both
ensure high data availability and minimize the risks of a natural disaster, it
was decided to physically relocate one node (a server running SANsymphony-V and
one disk array) to the remote secondary data center.

“We were able to transfer the node to the
secondary data center and implement disaster recovery without having to disable
the entire infrastructure,” notes Kosecki. “We had conducted many deployment test runs on the system and we decided
to maintain the whole environment live. The switchover w as very satisfactory
and completely non-disruptive. We simply powered down one of the SAN switches
and disconnected the disk array. The other node took over seamlessly. The data
remained available, production continued, and our users did not notice that we
had just implemented a new disaster recovery site.“

To read the full case study