Getronics PinkRoccade enables storage on demand with IBM

Headquartered in the Netherlands, Getronics is one of the largest IT services providers in Europe. The company employs 28,000 people worldwide and operates the largest commercial data centre in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, under the name of Getronics PinkRoccade, the organisation had five separate data centre locations, each with several floors of computer equipment, hosted on behalf of its enterprise customers. There were four different management teams, and many of the solutions and management tools were location-dependent, so there was little flexibility in the range of services that Getronics PinkRoccade could offer to its customers.

Frans Bank, Senior ICT Consultant at Getronics PinkRoccade, comments, “We wanted to create a more efficient data centre infrastructure, and to be able to offer greater flexibility and resilience to our customers, while maintaining competitive pricing.

“By consolidating to a dual data centre architecture, based on resilient IBM storage technologies, we are creating a new on demand environment for our customers. The new architecture offers enhanced flexibility and business continuity capabilities, with better customer service and improved performance.”


Delivering storage on demand
As enterprises consolidate their server and storage landscapes, the effect of a single component or system failure becomes proportionately more serious. One solution is to duplicate everything in a second, redundant data centre – but the costs of building and maintaining such an infrastructure are high. By outsourcing the hosting of their infrastructure to dedicated service providers such as Getronics PinkRoccade, companies can benefit from economies of scale in construction, maintenance and technical skills.

Says Frans Bank, “At Getronics PinkRoccade, we effectively share the infrastructure costs across our large customer base, so that they get the benefits at a lower price.”

To meet its customers’ business continuity requirements, Getronics PinkRoccade is consolidating its infrastructure and management teams to two duplicate data centres, with continual cross-site data mirroring. IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) is used to virtualize storage capacity throughout the network for the open systems, and Getronics PinkRoccade has introduced two IBM TotalStorage DS8300 systems to host customer systems. For the mainframe environment, Getronics PinkRoccade uses the Metro Mirror option within the DS8300 systems.

Says Frans Bank, “Our ultimate goal is to deliver storage on demand – matching our customers’ requirements quickly and easily from a single set of totally versatile virtualized resources. The first step was to create the foundations of this new architecture. We selected two DS8300 systems to replace five IBM Enterprise Storage Servers – based on their excellent performance and ease of management.”


Strong yet flexible
The DS8300 systems are already in production at Getronics PinkRoccade for around 10 customers in the open systems environment, and for a few mainframe logical partitions with IBM TotalStorage Metro Mirror software providing synchronous peer-to-peer remote copy services across the 150km distance between the two data centres.

Says Frans Bank, “New storage capacity for Getronics PinkRoccade customers is delivered from the DS8300, and we have SVC in production for some environments. SVC gives us significant flexibility in managing storage capacity – even on non-IBM devices – and has helped us to reduce the licensing costs for the data mirroring solution.”

He adds, “This is a long-term strategic project, and the first steps are to consolidate, standardise and optimise the storage infrastructure. With the new DS8300 systems and SVC, we are building a resilient yet flexible foundation to enable our future vision.”


Driving down TCO
With its data centre consolidation initiative, Getronics PinkRoccade is creating a single set of storage resources capable of being shared flexibly and dynamically between its numerous different customers. This new architecture will help to reduce long-term costs, eliminate location-specific solutions and create more flexibility for customers.

Frans Bank concludes, “We are already seeing reduced total cost of ownership with the DS8300 systems, and our cost-savings will really become significant when the data centre consolidation is complete. It will also be easier to ensure business continuity, and the IBM solution will help us to offer different service levels to different customers from the same set of physical resources.”