12 February 2010

x10sure and Hyper-V combine to help Deutscher Alpenverein achieve increased IT availability and agility.

Deutscher Alpenverein (DAV) is an alpine club that has approximately 815,000 members in its 354 regional chapters. A team of some 70 employees serves these chapters, which maintain over 300 alpine huts and shelters. They also care for 20,000 kilometres of alpine trails and 190 climbs. The club hosts approximately seven million daily visitors in the mountains each year.

The solution gives us a flexible, economical way to adapt our IT infrastructure to changes in business requirements.

Klaus Vogler , Deutscher Alpenverein Being able to properly manage the data of its members is extremely important to DAV. Only a few years ago, the company selected the x10sure consolidation and high-availability solution from Fujitsu Technology Solutions to manage such data, as well as support its Internet platform, enterprise resource planning applications, and communication and archiving services. DAV’s IT manager Klaus Vogler deployed the solution safe in the knowledge that if the company needed to make any adjustments later, it could do so.

When the company recently looked to reorganise and expand its applications and services, Vogler turned again to Fujitsu Technology Solutions and systems integrator GOB Software & Systeme. Building on the original x10sure installation, DAV economically expanded by adding Primergy Blade Servers with Intel Xeon processor technology and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V for server virtualisation.

Now, operating systems and applications are automatically started on the servers in the x10sure environment and are restarted automatically on the backup server in a matter of minutes in the event of a server failure. The server landscape has been consolidated using Primergy BX600 Blade Server technology and Microsoft Hyper-V, and, according to Vogler, this has resulted in high performance and maximum redundancy with minimum space requirements. A FibreCat SX80 storage system has also made it possible to scale storage capacity. Increased use of server virtualisation is another new aspect for DAV. By virtualising its main server, the Exchange front end and several application servers with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, the company can productively use the capacity of the back-up servers in the respective server classes for low-priority services and testing.

Vogler recalls when IT operations used to involve a trade-off between costs and risks. “Today, things have changed,” he says. “Now we benefit from economical, high-availability management of our applications.” Modification, expansion or the deployment of new technology, for example, no longer represent problems. A single backup server is all it takes to maintain the availability of a large number of physical and virtual servers. Capacity and performance bottlenecks are now as much a thing of the past as steadily increasing maintenance costs for outdated systems.

“x10sure is an out-of-the-box solution that is not only easy to implement and operate; the initial investment is significantly lower than that required for a conventional one-to-one high-availability management solution. The operating costs are considerably lower too,” says Vogler. “We need significantly less hardware, plus with x10sure and Hyper-V we can explore new heights in IT performance. The solution gives us a flexible, economical way to adapt our IT infrastructure to changes in business requirements.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 edition of Retailspeak magazine.

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