Remote Redundant RAID at Ursapharm

UrsapharmURSAPHARM Arzneimittel GmbH with head offices in Saarbrücken-Bübingen (Saarland) is one of the leading German companies in the field of ophthalmology. Nature and purpose of this family-owned company range from development, production, sales and distribution of  eye drops, eye pointments and universal medical supplies, to high performance contract manufacturing.

Customizing and quality management accompany and complete the entire production process.

The Mission

During the production process of such a company lots of data are generated, above all in the SAP environment and in quality control where chromatographic systems provide large amounts of data. The data resulting from these data processing systems need to be stored on a long-term basis and, above all, safely. They are indispensable for providing evidence of a production process according to GMP guidelines and no product is to be sold without them.

Moreover these data are generated around the clock. Therefore the relevant storage solution needs to be permanently available, too. In the course of the procurement of an adequate storage solution, the data of other services were to be stored redundantly, too, including file services for a large number of individual computers at the workplace and for data storage.

Different Windows operating systems are installed on the respective servers. The new storage system is to be linked via Fibre Channel and highly revolving Fibre Channel hard disks are to be used.

Our Solution

In order to ensure maximum data availability EUROstor offers a RAID solution, spread over two locations. In the process two separately located Fibre Channel RAID systems with RAID level 5 are reflected to a ES-9200 RAID head, thus creating a RAID51. This RAID head is a Dual Controller RAID, with both controllers also spread over two computer rooms.

As opposed to a conventional replication solution real mirroring takes place here, ensuring that the system continues without interruption even in case a complete unit fails. By means of RAID 5 each of the “SubRAIDs” is independently protected against disk failure.  Only the failure of an entire RAID will cause a break of the mirror on the head; nevertheless the data are still existing and available.

Different partitions on the RAID head may be put at the disposal of the individual application servers, thus controlling the visibility of the volumes by WWN filtering. The system may be expanded in order to take account of the steady increase of stored data – at first by introducing additional hard disks into the SubRAIDs and subsequently by means of expansion boxes.

ES-9200 Remote Redundant RAID:

  • All components are redundantly designed:  RAIDs, head, switches

  • Both SubRAIDs are mirrored against each other – no interruption even in case of a complete RAID failure

  • Both heads operate as a single Dual Controller RAID system, with the components spread over two locations.

  • Fibre Channel hard disks ensure high performance, even for data bases.

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Ursapharm Setup

Customers Opinion

„The good price/performance ratio together with competent and face-to-face technical advice was decisive for us“, says Stephan Schwarz, responsible for EDP administration. Apart from the enlarged storage capacity we are also benefitting from the higher availability of the data processing systems, resulting from the mirroring across two locations.

With its Remote Redundant RAID solution EUROstor provided us with a fast and centrally manageable fail-safe storage that optimally supports the concept of high availability.“

Further References