Hyper-converged infrastructure builds a better future for Bickhardt Bau
As a continually growing business, Bickhardt Bau required a storage solution which could efficiently handle increasing amounts of data. Availability was also a problem area for the construction firm as its IT infrastructure needed to be able to support round-the-clock business operations. Bickhardt Bau Aktiengesellschaft has been active in its field for 45 years and has an annual construction output of more than €400 million and over 1,600 qualified employees.
Challenge
Bickhardt Bau previously operated a storage environment based on NetApp FAS systems – an approach which the company was satisfied with for a long time. However, this infrastructure had become associated with high maintenance costs, which would have continued to increase as capacity expanded. The team at Bickhardt Bau examined various approaches that could future-proof the firm’s storage environment but despite these efforts, a solution couldn’t be found that could offer the significant cost reductions that the IT department required.
Solution
After conducting an internal kick-off and an inventory of the data centre, technical specialists from Proact developed a concept based on a vSAN software-defined storage solution from VMware, acting as a Stretched Cluster, which could be distributed over three locations with five physical server systems (including a dedicated quorum host). vSAN from VMware made it possible to logically bundle local storage resources, making them available through shared storage.
Proact kept precisely to our tight schedule, and the implementation took place very quickly and smoothly thanks to good project management and close cooperation.
