JULABO Replicates Critical Data Center Infrastructure between the USA and Europe using DataCore Software-Defined Storage

June 20, 2017 (PRLEAP.COM) Technology News
DataCore Reduced Storage-Related Costs by 50% While Improving Performance by 500%; Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for VMware using Riverbed WAN Optimization

Ft Lauderdale, Fla. and Unterfoehring, Germany, June 20, 2017 – DataCore Software today announced that SANsymphony™ was chosen by JULABO GmbH as the software-defined storage platform best suited to support its flexible virtual infrastructure. JULABO, a Germany-based worldwide provider of high-quality temperature control solutions, chose SANsymphony to ensure business continuity and high performance of VMware vSphere virtual machines synchronized across German and U.S. data centers. The VMs support Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft SQL Server and Matrix42 software and workspace management applications. A JULABO data center in Allentown, Pennsylvania mirrors the German headquarters systems located in the Black Forest using DataCore replication software and Riverbed WAN technology.

"The complete infrastructure project was implemented and supports the network, servers and storage using DataCore SANsymphony cost-effectively. The entire project was carried out at the same cost as what would we would have paid for storage alone if we had chosen a major storage hardware provider," said Jürgen Jonescheit, CIO JULABO GmbH.

JULABO GmbH is one of the foremost providers of high-quality, reliable and high-performance "Made in Germany" temperature control solutions for high-tech industries. With 10 branch offices on three continents and more than 400 employees, the central IT team provides support for Microsoft Dynamics ERP and other business-critical applications.

JULABO was faced with the need to move data between its remote sites and to headquarters, while also supporting rapid growth and new business requirements in its local markets. Growing workloads caused increased demands for high availability and greater flexibility, prompting it to implement a comprehensive virtual infrastructure across the entire organization. Today JULABO maintains mirrored computer centers in two different sites, protected with various fire compartments, as well as a third computer center located to support off-site storage of backups. All of the sites are connected via a high-performance fibre channel network.

Parallel I/O, Fusion-io and High-Speed Caching Drive 5x Performance Increase
DataCore partner and system integrator Leitwerk AG was commissioned to implement VMware vSphere and DataCore SANsymphony on the main site. Today all systems are virtualized, with workloads running across 170 virtual machines on redundantly designed VMware ESX servers on HP Proliant hardware, each with 768 GB RAM and 16 cores.

SANsymphony also runs on an HP Proliant and virtualizes 50TB of storage capacity (SAS, SATA, SSD/flash) while providing synchronized highly available data to applications. DataCore provides auto failover protection and high availability to ensure accessibility to the two HP D2700 disk shelves. In addition to DataCore's high-speed caching, Fusion-io PCIe flash memory cards were integrated within the DataCore software-defined storage nodes, providing cost-effective performance by using DataCore auto-tiering to manage and optimize performance and resource utilization.

DataCore's Parallel I/O technology leverages multi-cores to improve I/O performance and response times needed by demanding applications by processing I/O requests in parallel. JULABO estimates that, in comparison with hardware-bound architecture, DataCore has resulted in a five-fold increase in performance. Up to 40,000 IOPS with 64K blocks were achieved during tests under realistic real-world conditions.

"Hardware solutions were not able to achieve the DataCore performance results and value, even with twice the number of spindles," Jonescheit added.

"We chose DataCore because of its excellent price/performance ratio and its outstanding technical design. Good examples are the automatic failover for high availability and auto-tiering for performance. We have put this functionality into practice successfully. However, the flexibility resulting from hardware independence does not only have technical and functional advantages. It also allows us to flexibly extend our infrastructure cost-effectively to maximize our economic efficiency, as we are now vendor-independent," Jonescheit concluded.

Benefits at a glance:
  • DataCore reduces storage-related costs by 50%.
  • Performance has improved 5-fold.
  • Storage-related failures were reduced by 90%.
  • Time spent on routine administrative tasks was reduced by 90%.
  • Planned downtime (data migrations, upgrades, updates) was reduced by over 95%.
  • DataCore managed to convert 50% of unused storage space into available free storage capacity.

  • See the full case study here.

    About JULABO
    JULABO is a worldwide leading manufacturer of high-quality, innovative temperature control solutions for an extensive range of scientific, research, and industrial applications. USA: http://www.julabo.com/us Germany: http://www.julabo.com/de

    About DataCore
    DataCore is a leading provider of software-defined storage and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions powered by Adaptive Parallel I/O technology, delivering higher performance, greater application workload productivity and cost savings. DataCore leverages the multi-core advances and cost efficiency of off-the-shelf x86 server platforms to overcome the IT industry's biggest problem, the I/O bottleneck. With DataCore, customers enjoy faster application response times and lower costs by making full use of their available computing resources to multiply productivity. The SANsymphony™ software-defined storage product pools diverse storage despite differences and incompatibilities among manufacturers, models, and generations of equipment. The software can span multiple locations and devices to bring them under the control of a common set of enterprise-wide data services for management automation and infrastructure simplification. DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN software provides similar services using the internal or direct-attached storage spread across physical or virtual servers in a cluster.

    The company has been privately held since its founding in 1998, and today has more than 10,000 customer sites across the globe. DataCore solutions are also available within turnkey appliances from hardware manufacturers including Lenovo. Visit http://www.datacore.com or call (877) 780-5111 for more information.

    DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. Other DataCore product or service names or logos referenced herein are trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

    Company contacts:
    JULABO GmbH, Gerhard-Juchheim-Strasse 1, 77960 Seelbach, Tel: +49 (0) 7823 / 510, info.de@julabo.com, www.julabo.com
    LEITWERK AG, Im Ettenbach 13a, D-77767 Appenweier
    DataCore Software GmbH, Bahnhofstr. 18, 85774 Unterföhring, Tel: 089 4613570-0, infoGermany@datacore.com

    Press contacts:
    U.S.: SVM Public Relations, Jill Colna, +1 401-490-9700, datacore@svmpr.com
    EMEA: KPR Global, Michael Baumann, +49-151-58728448, mbaumann@kprglobal.com
    UK: KPR Global, Sharon Munday, +44 23 9311 4100, smunday@kprglobal.com

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