Basler Insurance, one of Germany’s leading insurance companies, has future-proofed its storage architecture to withstand the ultimate disaster scenario – the complete destruction of the main data center. Due to the powerful combination of DataCore’s virtualization and remote site AIM (Asynchronous IP Mirroring) technologies, should the worse happen, business critical operations can be continued after only a few hours.
Basler Insurance ranks among the top 30 insurance companies in Germany and was formed through the merger of Basler and Securitas in 2003; leaving a legacy infrastructure of two data centers, 300 miles apart, which potentially exposed business critical data. An emergency data replication scenario that continuously updates business critical data between the sites at Bad Homburg and Bremen needed to be implemented with servers being staged and fed continuously with replicated data to withstand emergencies.
Custom-made protection
"The decision in favor of a double data mirror proved absolutely correct. When we had a breakdown, DataCore’s automatic failover and recovery functionality kicked in and ensured that our applications were spared," sums up Thomas Dörr, Head of Disaster Planning / Network, Basler. "Today we have a fully functioning disaster recovery solution across sites as well as on-site high availability and hardware independence, with cost savings of up to 50 percent. Both Kramer & Crew and DataCore have provided us with outstanding support and advice."
Cologne-based IT service provider Kramer & Crew developed a multi-stage protection scenario to span across both data centers. Their proposed solution framework consisted of the SAN in the primary data center being designated as highly available with DataCore’s virtualization platform, SANsymphony. Two DataCore-powered Storage Domain Servers (SDS) each a standard Intel-based server running SANsymphony Enterprise Edition, provide the central management interface of all data storage, taking on the allocation of the virtual devices and mirroring in the SAN. Today, the storage pool consists of two redundant HDS storage arrays (HDS Tagmastor AMS 200) in use for business critical data as well as terabytes of a cost-efficient SATA array as a target device for snapshots and for recovery, in case of data loss.
One immediate cost savings that Basler experienced was that an older, enterprise storage subsystem whose leasing contract had expired, was replaced during the project with more cost-efficient hardware. "It makes sense to make the data highly available and to mirror it locally in the SAN before the replication occurs. But many users balk at investing in redundant high-performance systems. SANsymphony offers a true alternative, as it carries forward the functionality to every beneficial storage subsystem imaginable. Thereby, users can cost effectively extend the capacity for the mirroring without forfeiting performance or protection of the data," explains Servet Büyük, Sales Executive, Kramer & Crew.
Asynchronous Mirroring via WAN
The data replication is controlled by the SANsymphony AIM software, which replicates daily the data to Bremen in the background. At the remote site, DataCore’s SANmelody is utilized along with AIM and another Tagmastor system to form the target of the asynchronous mirroring. This multi-stage data mirroring concept protects File Services and application data running under different operating system environments, including Novell Netware, a DB2-based insurance application, a main data warehouse system, based on SAS, and the human resource system, based on an Oracle database.