DBV-Winterthur, one of the largest insurance groups in Germany, has centralized storage management with a storage virtualization system, and in the process saved money and improved performance. With an increasing number of users and applications, DBV-Winterthur needed to increase storage capacity and improve performance in its two computer centers. In addition, the two centers, in different buildings, each had their own storage area networks (SAN) but suffered performance losses in mirroring data between them.

Systems integrator Kramer & Crew suggested integrating the two SANs into one consistent, virtual management platform with SANsymphony from DataCorp, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner. SAN symphony sits on top of the Windows operating system, and according to company spokeswoman Bettye Grant, the Windows connection is a big reason for the cost savings the solution is able to facilitate.

“Because we run on Windows, you don’t have to buy a high-end storage system, you can buy a Dell or an HDS Thunder,” she said.

DBV-Winterthur had high-end HDS Lightning 9960s in each of the centers. Instead of adding another high-end and costly HDS Lightning, using SANsymphony two considerably cheaper HDS Thunder 9585V machines could augment the SAN to handle the capacity growth. The SANsymphony intelligent storage domain software was then able to cut the performance loss out of the mirroring process by managing and accelerating the storage pools and facilitating the mirroring of data between the disk arrays.

“We noticed that the synchronous mirroring between the HDS Thunder and Lightning, which hadn't been possible at all before, was now a reality using SANsymphony, and best of all it was even faster than the original mirroring between the high-end devices," said Peter Seitz-McIntyre, head of IT at DBV-Winterthur.

The way DataCore's virtualization solution works is that it enables the integration of disk capacity in a virtual storage pool that nearly 50 servers can easily access. Two SANsymphony-powered storage domain servers are located at each center but work together to centralize the storage management of more than 30 TBs of storage. The storage domain servers can automatically serve capacity to any needy server at DBV-Winterthur. Additional functions like snapshots, synchronous data replication and asynchronous mirroring over IP as well as remote mirror system failover are responsible for the high availability of the data.

“We needed the flexibility of virtualization and the ability to achieve centralized storage management with functions such as snapshots and fast synchronous mirroring. SANsymphony met all these demands," said Seitz-McIntyre.

In addition, DBV-Winterthur uses DataCore's analysis tool SANmaestro to analyze overall storage requirements and resource utilization. SANmaestro is able to record and chart performance data, capacity and frequency of use at a particular time as well as over extended periods. This allows DBV-Winterthur to spot and monitor performance hotspots, poor utilization, and to improve system use and predictability.