Sigel Deploys DataCore Hypervisor

DataCore Software Corporation
announced that Sigel GmbH, a manufacturer of
office supplies and accessories, has implemented a flexible storage
infrastructure solution based on SANsymphony-V Storage Hypervisor.

The software solution supports adaptive caching and automated storage tiering
which optimizes the mix of SSD storage and SAS disk drives to provide performance and available storage infrastructure for
the company’s VMware vSphere and Oracle database systems. Sigel has improved
performance and flexibility and has benefited by realizing up front cost
savings of 30% or more and long-term purchasing power savings since any storage
can be added when needed at the then ‘best available’ pricing.

"For a company like us
with a high growth rate, DataCore is a best fit," says Hans Wiedemann,
head of IT at Sigel. "We now are independent
from having to rely on expensive storage manufacturers and we can easily expand
capacity and performance flexibly to support our critical applications and
databases. SANsymphony-V delivers
automatic HA without the need to manually administer the system.
Our storage is more efficient and faster than before. In addition, we know we
would have paid 30% or more if we had gone with a hardware-only solution,"

For all the company’s sales and business processes,
such as ordering and invoicing, Sigel uses the Electronic Data Industry EDIFACT
standard. A disruption or downtime of the system means a full stop to
their business operations – so continuous HA is critical. For this reason, the
IT department is constantly working to ensure the stability and optimization of
its data center systems and is always on the lookout for new solutions to help
avoid downtime.

Sigel already experienced the benefits of virtualization at the server level.
They consolidated their server systems to maximize room and costs in the data
center and they were able to shut down a number of physical servers. Instead of
15 Linux and twelve Windows systems, they now operate their business on a vSphere platform running on four Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX300 servers. To
manage their storage and provide HA, Sigel decided to invest in a storage
hypervisor from DataCore and at the same time to add some new storage hardware
to help performance.

DataCore’s storage virtualization enabled the company to integrate
the existing storage investments and new storage hardware regardless of
manufacturer or model into a virtual shared storage resource pool. Two Fujitsu
PRIMERGY RX300 servers with dual Intel Xeon CPUs with 48GB RAM systems and
multiple SSD and SAS disks are all under SANsymphony-V
control and management at Sigel.

Since its implementation, the storage environment has run without a single
interruption. The IT manager describes the system administration as
‘intuitive and familiar’ – with a Windows-like management interface that
is "innovative and easy to use." Within minutes, virtual drives
with auto-tiering and auto failover data protection features can be
created and assigned and provisioned to virtual or physical machines.

Accelerated performance of
applications
with Auto-Tiering
Sigel also reported a measurable and noticeable acceleration of the
overall performance of their VM environment in combination with the DataCore
caching software. Compared to the old infrastructure, the frequent ‘night
upgrades and installations’ – where they had to perform jobs like software
updates – now only takes a quarter of the time it took previously. In addition
to caching, DataCore’s auto-tiering function moves higher performance workloads
and data – for example the Oracle databases that require faster response times
and more demanding I/O – to the faster SSD drives; while less-used and active
data remains on the lower cost SAS HDDs.

Sigel is a mid-sized company headquartered in
Mertingen, in Bavaria Germany. Nearly 300 employees develop, manufacture and
market products and solutions for business office applications. The Business
Products division develops products for a modern working office environment.
The Business Segment Print Works division produces order-related
forms, laser roll forms, thermal forms, banking and government forms.