Ursapharm: Permformance-Cluster for VMware

URSAPHARM Arzneimittel GmbH – a leading pharmaceutical manufacturer from Saarland, Germany. For more than 40 years, the name URSAPHARM has stood for the consistent transfer of innovative pharmaceutical concepts into successful medical products. Since it was founded in 1974, the pharmaceutical manufacturer has developed into a globally operating group of companies. Numerous innovative products and patents secure the company’s future and offer over 600 highly qualified employees at the headquarters in Saarbrücken and the sales countries excellent working conditions and promising future prospects. As a pharmaceutical manufacturer in particular, there are unique demands on IT. Essential factors, in addition to appropriate development, validation and training environment, are above all the availability, security, and reliability of the data in production as well as quality control.
More information at www.ursapharm.de

URSAPHARM needed a new data storage solution due to their increased demand in terms of data storage capacities, both in the production and manufacturing environments. The requirements for a suitable storage solution included:

– The ability to minimize potential downtimes
– A system that could provide high performance and lower latencies
– The ability to deal with higher data loads
– Data storage in separate locations to increase overall security
– A proven VMware certified system due to the company’s long-term reliance on ESXi
– Cost efficiency or Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
– The system should have High Availability (HA) architecture for the highest performance

After all key figures and expectations had been agreed upon, EUROstor offered Ursapharm a customer-specific data storage system, specifically designed for their needs.
The solution, consisting of two independent nodes, JBODs, and switches, had impressed the customer with its extreme reliability. This ”redundancy at all levels” approach ensured smooth operation. In addition to synchronized data in two fire or building sections, it also offered additional protection thanks to built-in On- & Off-site Data Protection technology. A complete memory image was created with space-saving ZFS snapshots, which allowed a previous version to be restored at
any time if viruses or ransomware attacks occurred.
Should a hardware defect occur, High Availability clustering allowed one of the devices to fail without affecting day-to-day business. In the event of a disaster, the software would automatically trigger a so-called “failover” which would switch the production nodes.
URSAPHARM was immediately impressed by the proposed timeframe of the migration and the complete integration of the new system. Profound knowledge in the data storage field and excellent technical support have rounded off the range of services.

Stephan Schwarz, IT manager, URSAPHARM GmbH:

 

”We’ve been using redundant storage systems from EUROstor for three generations now,” says Stephan Schwarz, IT
manager at URSAPHARM. “For us, some of the benefits of the new HA metro cluster include increased performance and
improved system management through Open-E JovianDSS as well as the significantly increased storage capacity.
Highly competent employees, great personal advice, a high level of trustworthiness and ultimately a good priceperformance
ratio were all crucially important for our decision in favor of EUROstor. “