Powerful storage environment for effective receivables management

Background

The EOS Group is a leading technology-based investor in receivables portfolios and an expert in processing outstanding receivables. The Group includes more than 60 operating companies with locations in 24 countries. As the EOS Group's IT service provider, Hamburg-based EOS Technology Solutions GmbH (EOS TS) develops and operates both the IT infrastructure and platforms to ensure smooth IT operations and drive digital transformation across the Group.

Challenge

EOS TS currently operates two data centers in Hamburg and manages the IT landscape of the entire group from there. Automated and standardized processes reduce the administrative effort and save the admin teams a lot of time. In the storage environment, however, this was no longer possible: Numerous aging storage systems from different manufacturers were difficult to update and manage. An additional virtualization layer made operation even more difficult. When it became clear that the existing storage systems could no longer adequately support the digital transformation, those responsible decided to redesign and set up the entire storage environment. In the virtualized storage landscape at EOS, individual clients could not be separated from each other, so internal customers shared a virtual storage pool. The disadvantage: If one area was working with a performance-hungry application, this quickly affected the other customer environments. To enable clearly separated storage areas in the future, the new storage solution therefore had to be multi-client capable.

Solution

EOS TS has been using two all-flash storage systems from Huawei for several years. Based on the positive experience, the IT managers decided to build the new storage landscape uniformly on the basis of Huawei solutions. In addition to the modern technology, the high performance of the systems and Huawei's support scored points. Today, the Hamburg-based company uses four Huawei OceanStor Dorado V3 and four Huawei OceanStor Dorado V6 as block storage for the VMware environment and for several Oracle RAC systems (Oracle Real Application Clusters). In addition, there are two clusters based on Huawei OceanStor 100D for distributed storage. Currently, around three petabytes of data are stored - and the trend is rising. The eight Huawei OceanStor Dorado systems were easily installed and commissioned in both data centers over a period of five years (2017-2021) within one day each - including configuration and failover tests. As Huawei's implementation partner, the Bechtle Group assisted the Hamburg-based company. The implementation of the Huawei OceanStor 100D in 2020 was somewhat more complex, as the Hamburg team had no previous experience with intelligent distributed storage solutions. Therefore, two Huawei employees took over the installation and implemented not only the systems but also the appropriate network infrastructure on site within a few days.

Advantages

The new storage environment enables EOS TS to provide scalable storage resources for the entire group as a self-service. Depending on the requirements, internal customers can select and independently manage suitable services or buckets, e.g., for their container solutions, around the clock. Speaking of containers, Huawei solutions work seamlessly with EOS TS's Kubernetes-based container environment. Customers can set up and scale the storage clusters they need at any time without fear of performance degradation. Even if other companies deploy container clusters at the same time. In addition, all peripheral systems affected by this - such as the configuration management database (CMDB) or monitoring - continue to run unaffected. With Huawei's storage solutions, EOS TS distributes its storage across different logical and physical systems. This makes the storage landscape more fail-safe than before. At the same time, the different clients can be easily separated, which provides a significant performance boost.

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