Case Study: POLY-TOOLS implements iSCSI cluster with Open-E DSS V7

The main goal of POLY-TOOLS bennewart GmbH, a leading blow mold manufacturer from Europe, was to remain a reliable partner for customers. The company’s mission is to comprehensively support customers from the first idea to successful product deployment. In order to fulfill the demanding requirements of the market, the company decided for a High Availability solution with Open-E DSS V7 Active-Active Failover based on two ES-8724 systems from Open-E Gold Partner EUROstor. It turned out to be best choice they could make. Here’s a short summery with more details.

Challenges

POLY-TOOLS bennewart GmbH is an international manufacturer of technically complex blow molds, who develops and produces high-quality tools with the most modern construction methods. At the same time they provide efficient manufacturing processes and high quality products at competitive prices.

However their storage environment, after years of constant development, turned out to be in need for a complete renewal. POLY-TOOLS’ current NAS solution was not as reliable as it used to be and caused problems. Additionally, it did not meet the increased demands of the company. That’s why POLY-TOOLS decided to contact their long-time IT consultant – save IT first from Germany – who proposed a strategy with two new VMware ESX servers and a storage system with Open-E DSS V7

Active-active iSCSI cluster implementation

With the new setup in place, POLY-TOOLS was able to achieve High Availability and were able to reach the required speed and performance for their most demanding applications. Moreover, by mixing SSDs and SAS Nearline disks as well as by using NAS shares for backup, all requirements could be fulfilled. For more secure storage, the NAS environment was additionally mirrored to the second system. The new solution offers simplified management of all storage resources and allows for an easy overview of POLY-TOOLS entire storage environment. Now, hardware failures can be immediately analyzed and fixed.

As for the hardware setup, POLY-TOOLS decided for an active-active cluster based on two ES-8724 systems from EUROstor. Each system contains 6 x 1GbE as well as 2 x 10GbE ports. I/O-critical applications are stored on a separate SSD RAID set. Additionally, 11 x 1TB SAS Nearline disks are used for the remaining virtual machines. The NAS part includes 4 x 2TB SAS Nearline disks and the ES-8724 systems are using QLogic 10GbE SFP+ network cards for synchronous replication.The ESX servers from save IT first include two powerful Xeon E5V3 CPUs as well as 128GB DDR4 RAM each.

Active-Active cluster setup with Open-E DSS V7

Success!

“Our High Availiability storage solution is very easy to administrate with Open-E DSS V7 and offers exceptional reliability. By purchasing the EUROstor storage systems, POLY-TOOLS was able to ensure highest security of the IT-specific and critical processes. Downtime could be reduced to a minimum and data throughput was drastically increased.”

Tobias Lickteig
IT Project Manager and Enterprise Administrator at POLY-TOOLS

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