The global EOS Group, one of Europe's leading providers of financial and authorization services for the banking and insurance business sectors, employs about 5,000 people and has experienced rapid growth over the last few years. And at its headquarters in Hamburg, to meet their increasing business demands they faced a number of IT challenges: These include the processing and verification of sensitive customer data, more automation of how to acquire new clients, tracking and maintaining accounting information and maintaining and alerting their clients on important follow-ups and reminders, to processing payables and collections of receivables and the buying and selling of portfolio items - all these services are top priority jobs for the IT headquarters team.

The Challenge:
To get control of their ever-growing amounts of data, EOS decided it needed to find a flexible, extensible and easy-to-manage solution to improve their storage and storage area network (SAN). They also need a very high availability solution and this aspect would play a critical role in their decision, obviously they also needed to find a way to save money on operational costs and were looking for a simultaneous reduction in energy and maintenance costs.

They needed to do a massive expansion of their data centers to keep up with growth and they knew they needed to modernize their systems to achieve greater productivity. They decided a completely new solution was a necessity.

The Solution:
The financial services EOS opted for Storage Virtualization Software solution from DataCore to virtualize, manage and work across their Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 storage systems and PRIMERGY servers within the SAN.

The result: The EOS Group benefited from increased performance, the highest levels of data protection and reduced maintenance costs.

Eight Fujitsu ETERNUS DX80 storage systems, each with 36 terabytes of net disk space and four Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX600 servers allowed the EOS Group to scale up well beyond its original 30 terabytes of capacity. After the expansion they now manage 288 terabytes of net capacity under DataCore storage virtualization control - and if they have additional data growth it will no longer be a problem since they can easily scale the architecture. And thanks to the DataCore virtualization solution, they now all can manage all their storage in a common way and scale independently of all the underlying physical hardware.

What else did EOS want? Greater business continuity, resiliency from major failures and disaster recovery, of course. Therefore Fujitusu and DataCore combined to achieve an even higher level of protection and business continuity and deal with disaster events. The system was set up with mirrored data to a remote site that was reflected fully and kept in sync with the main site. The remote site was located across town and took advantage of DataCore's ability to stretch mirrors at high-speed and the software automatically updates and mirrors the data to create identical virtual disks that reside on different drives and can be arbitrarily far apart. With DataCore, EOS has achieved its goal for greater business continuity and disaster recovery.