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MUNICH, Germany, Sept. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- DataCore Software today announced that The Machine and Turbine Union (MTU) Friedrichshafen, a leading worldwide manufacturer of diesel motors and engines, has deployed DataCore's SANsymphony software to manage and virtualize its growing storage network. The solution currently manages over 60 terabytes of production data supporting various data bases, SAP R3 and advanced computer aided manufacturing and design applications.
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MUNICH, Germany, Sept. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- DataCore Software today announced that The Machine and Turbine Union (MTU) Friedrichshafen, a leading worldwide manufacturer of diesel motors and engines, has deployed DataCore's SANsymphony software to manage and virtualize its growing storage network. The solution currently manages over 60 terabytes of production data supporting various data bases, SAP R3 and advanced computer aided manufacturing and design applications. The software enables all the storage to be managed centrally to lower overall administrative costs. In addition, SANsymphony added a new level of high-availability storage protection via its high speed synchronous mirroring capability and redundant storage domain servers. The bottom-line is that MTU administrators are now well equipped to meet changing requirements, deal with regularly occurring data migrations and benefit from improved responsiveness and system performance due to SANsymphony's storage acceleration technology -- even in spite of utilizing inexpensive hardware. "We were looking for an open storage platform, which could lower the administrative workload and ensure the highest levels of availability and data protection," said Bernhard Welti, Director Corporate IT Infrastructure, The MTU Friedrichshafen. "Furthermore we no longer wanted to be bound to one hardware manufacturer. With SANsymphony installed, we are able to use our resources more effectively and lower our costs for hardware. The auto provisioning function of SANsymphony allocates the resources centrally and effectively; thereby we can avoid the downtimes normally associated with providing disk space and cut out half of the work and time related to performing storage administration." The MTU group and Detroit Diesel are the leading core brands of Tognum GmbH group. The MTU Friedrichshafen designs, manufactures and delivers engines, diesel motors and complete power systems for ships, heavy land and railway vehicles, industrial drives and turbines. MTU Friedrichshafen is a leading engine drive line producer for the automobile industry. Friedrichshafen is, along with Detroit (USA) and Suzhou (China), one of the three major production locations of MTU. A Virtual Storage Platform for Business Continuance; Achieving High Availability and Failover Storage Protection via DataCore's SANsymphony The MTU Friedrichshafen has a unique role in that it manages the lion's share of the data for the MTU Group. Specifically, MTU Friedrichshafen manages servers supporting File systems, Exchange, SQL data bases, SAP R3 as well as various Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications. Locations all over the world need to access the data around-the-clock. This requirement and the constant global activity stress the systems and increase the demand for even higher levels of availability and failover. In order to achieve hardware independence and maximize overall efficiency, MTU entrusted its system integrator Bechtle with the responsibility to make their virtualization project a reality. Currently, 62 TB of data from different disk subsystems are managed by three storage domain servers (SDSs) running SANsymphony. All storage devices within the system can be accessed via nine Fibre Channel switches, regardless of the type or manufacturer. What's more, system-wide processes can be controlled centrally and efficiently. The system has built-in redundancy, thereby providing high availability by synchronous mirroring. In addition, the automatic allocation of storage (auto provisioning) provides the applications with capacity from the central resource pool, without requiring any further actions of the administrator. Plans are also in place for SANsymphony to support remote sites through the use of asynchronous mirroring to another computer center of the MTU Friedrichshafen, which is many kilometers away. With asynchronous mirroring, data can be transported via IP based WANs over large distances. "We are very pleased that we were able to demonstrate to MTU Friedrichshafen the advantages of our virtualization platform," explained Christian Hagen, Sales Director, DataCore. "By adding SANsymphony to virtualize their environment they optimized their overall flexibility and reliability, while lowering their costs remarkably." A Virtualization Infrastructure That Embraces VMware Around the same time as the DataCore implementation, MTU Friedrichshafen established VMware's ESX for server virtualization. This increasingly popular combination of server and storage virtualization makes sense since it maximizes overall flexibility, while providing the highest levels of availability and failover. The MTU environment presently comprises both a virtual storage pool that supports auto-provisioning of virtual capacity and nearly 300 VMware virtual servers. A major benefit of this virtual environment is that new systems can be quickly deployed and a new SAP portal for business partners ("SAP Enterprise") was established within a very short period of time. "Such a project would have taken more than a month from the initial request to the installation of the required hardware," said Welti. "With our DataCore and VMware virtual platform, this period of time was shortened to only a few minutes." About MTU Friedrichshafen Until the end of 2005, the MTU Group belonged to the Off-Highway business unit of DaimlerChrysler. In March 2006 it was sold to the Swedish investment group EQT. The firm and brand comprising the MTU Group have been operating under the business name of Tognum since July 2006. This strategic holding unites the enterprises operating under the brands MTU, Detroit Diesel, L'Orange, MDE, CFC Solutions and the Driveline division under one organization. The MTU Friedrichshafen delivers diesel motors and complete power systems and engines for ships, heavy road and railway vehicles, industrial drives and turbines. In a separate business area, the MTU Friedrichshafen manufactures engine drive lines for the automobile industry. Besides Detroit (USA) and Suzhou (China), Friedrichshafen is one of the three major production locations of the MTU. About DataCore Software DataCore Software fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage. DataCore's disk server software easily adds capacity expansion and centralized storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMware, MacOS, and NetWare systems. DataCore is privately held with corporate headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, visit http://www.datacore.com. DataCore, the DataCore logo, SANsymphony, SANmelody, SANmaestro, SANmotion and Powered by DataCore 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. |
