Speed and performance guaranteed for Erzbistum Bamberg
Demands on the IT infrastructure at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bamberg have exploded over the last five years. While in the past the archdiocese only had to provide PCs with a little memory and a network, requirements with respect to performance, availability, and scalability have become much greater. Realising that its existing IT infrastructure wasn’t up to the challenge, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bamberg sought a solution.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bamberg is a diocese in northern Bavaria and covers a large part of Franconia. Around 700,000 Catholics live between Ansbach, Hof, Bayreuth, and Rothenburg, and they are served by around 7,000 diocese staff members, 700 of whom are employed in administration. The IT department is made up of 12 members of staff who are tasked with keeping almost 3,000 IT workstations in the diocese operational.
Challenge
With a complex NetApp environment which hadn’t been configured optimally, the archdiocese couldn’t do anything quickly as too many services were running and the storage system could no longer support them. The organisation was also struggling with administration duties due to its streamlined IT workforce and at the same time, the archdiocese needed to ensure high availability of its services. A cost efficient, easy-to-manage solution was required.
Solution
Proact created a comprehensive design that could fulfil requirements for the next five years. With the new system, Proact’s experts were able to meet the customer goal of 100% full virtualisation. A classic MetroCluster from NetApp is the basis of the new infrastructure which consists of four FAS8040 nodes that are distributed over two data centres. MetroCluster is supported by ClusterLion in order to reduce administrative costs, which automatically detects a site malfunction. Commvault Simpana was also replaced by Commvault IntelliSnap, this solution modernising backup.
“If you look at all factors such as ease of maintenance, availability, administration, speed, scalability, as well as savings on backups, we now benefit from a much better price for performance.”
