Name of the contract: Providing high availability of IT services in SSI Schäfer
Name of submitter: SSI Schäfer Ltd.
Headquaters: Tovární 325, 753 01 Hranice
ID(IČO): 610607 55
The subject of this contract is to consolidate server infrastructure and ensure high availability of IT services:
- 2 disk arrays HP EVA 4400 SHP Continuous Access
- HP DL380 Servers
- VMware vSphere Advanced to 8 CPUs
The project dealt with the replacement of existing outdated server infrastructure with local disks, without a central data management, while ensuring high availability IT infrastructure in operation with continuous three-shift operation.
As a solution VMware Vitrual Infrastructure was deployed at total of 4 production servers, also a backup site was created for a Disaster Recovery. In the primary site a disk array and 2 servers are located. In the back up site a secondary disk array with synchronous replication of data and the other 2 servers (out of 4) are located. This distribution allows effectively cover various scenarios of unavailability one of the infrastructure parts while using hardware from both locations, which are in one LAN and SAN network.(meaning that the backup location is also a production location and is not just waiting unused for the failure of the primary location). In case of malfunction of any servers there is VMware High Availability (VMware Fault Tolerance) that will resume operation on virtual servers in the secondary location. In the event of primary disk array or the entire primary site, servers in the secondary location will map to the replicated area on the secondary disk array and allow operation of all infrastructures from the secondary site.
Products of company VMware are state of the art solutions in virtualization and consolidation. That is the reason for choosing this particular platform. With regard to protection needs of mission-critical servers on one hand and achieving a relatively low cost solution on the other an Advancer edition was chosen, having above all also VMware Fault Tolerance, that provides option of uninterrupted move of operation to another server using the technology of shadow copies. Advanced edition includes also the functionality of VMware HA (high availability restart in case of failure) vMotion (uninterrupted “live” migration of virtual servers between hardware servers) etc., which brings opportunities of uninterrupted operation, increased comfort and flexibility of server infrastructure, and as a result reduces the cost of ownership.
In terms of hardware, this solution was built on HP DL 380 servers, disk arrays HP EVA 4400 with synchronous replication HP ContinuousAccess, HP SAN infrastructure (Brocade OEM)