W & W Informatik boosts performance with high-speed storage from IBM

W & W Informatik is the IT service provider for Wüstenrot and Württembergische AG, a German financial company. Based in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, the company employs 800 people and hosts data for around 15 other financial-sector clients at two data-centers.

As a provider of hosted services to an industry in which availability and high performance are paramount concerns, W & W Informatik is constantly striving to improve service to its customers by finding ways to handle high transaction volumes quickly, safely and efficiently. For many years, the company has relied on the IBM System z family to provide the performance and stability its customers demand.

“We have three IBM System z servers at our two data-centers,” explains Ulrich Enz, Head of Database, Middleware and Storage Systems at W & W Informatik. “It is a classic IBM mainframe environment, with the mainframes and storage mirrored across our two sites for high availability.

“However, we were starting to find that the processing capacity of the mainframes was being impeded by slow input-output speeds from our storage hardware, which were causing bottlenecks and producing sub-optimal performance. We needed to re-think our network and storage environments.”


Consolidation for low TCO
W & W Informatik sent an invitation to tender to a number of storage hardware vendors and was impressed by the low total cost of ownership of a solution proposed by Comparex, an IBM Premier Business Partner.

Comparex suggested consolidating the company’s five existing storage systems – three Hitachi disk systems and two older IBM storage servers – to just two IBM System Storage DS8100s. This would mean moving both the hosted financial data and the company’s own email, Linux and IBM AIX systems to a single storage area network (SAN).

“There is a large amount of data – around 48TB – and much of it is business-critical,” says Ulrich Enz. “Nevertheless, we were confident in the new hardware and in our team’s ability to migrate these systems safely. We were able to pull the data from the older storage to the two DS8100 systems remotely, with very little effort and no effect on the production environment.”

The new DS8100 systems are linked to each other and to the System z machines by fiber channel connections. IBM Metro Mirror is used for synchronous mirroring between the two storage systems, which are located in data centers 800 meters apart. To help increase performance, the systems are fitted with host bus adapters capable of data rates of up to 4Gbps.

“This is very leading-edge technology, so we became part of the IBM Early Shipment Program,” explains Ulrich Enz. “We were sure that a faster host bus adapter could bring us real business benefits in terms of query performance and data mirroring, and we were right – the full bandwidth is already being used, helping the company to satisfy its very demanding customers.”

The Early Shipment Program has allowed W & W Informatik to test and evaluate the quality and performance of this new product before it becomes generally available. The Program provides an enhanced IBM support package which has facilitated the introduction and acceptance of the new technology by W & W Informatik’s IT department.


Industry-leading performance
With help from Comparex, W & W Informatik has implemented an IBM solution which helps it maximize the efficiency of its IT infrastructure. The new host bus adapters and high speed disks in the DS8100s have virtually eliminated the I/O bottleneck, letting the System z mainframes perform to their full potential.

“We have seen the speed of mirroring between the two storage systems increase four-fold, even though there is now considerably more data to be mirrored,” says Ulrich Enz. “This helps us with high availability, and keeps the data in the test and development data-centre fully synchronized with the production environment.”

“Our clients have also directly experienced the benefits of the new infrastructure,” he adds. “The speed of query processing has doubled, helping them run reports and financial models more quickly, on real-time data, and giving them the ability to analyze all the options before taking a decision.”

“With IBM, W & W Informatik has achieved better performance across the board, and at a lower total cost of operation than any of the rival solutions offered,” concludes Ulrich Enz. “Early adoption of innovative IBM technologies enables us to deliver better performance, helping us to maintain our position as one of Germany’s top financial IT providers.”