The traditional SCHRAG Group is a family-run company now in its fourth generation. With around 450 employees in five European countries, it manufactures edging profiles, façade cladding and roofing products. Reliability, speed and quality form the cornerstone of SCHRAG's successful business policy - requirements that the company also places on its IT at the company headquarters in Hilchenbach near Siegen.
There, the homogeneously grown and redundant infrastructure was housed in two seperate fire compartments on the company premises. To increase availability, the storage systems of the virtualized x86 servers were mirrored. The productive IBM Power i system was backed up using the cold-backup method via a second IBM Power i system, onto which the last backup of the productive system was restored if necessary.
The six other locations were connected via an MPLS network and accessed the applications through Citrix terminal services.
DATAGROUP was commissioned in 2012* to provide a new system environment with significantly higher availability, which above all needed to be protected against external influences.
SCHRAG's backup data center area was outsourced to one of DATAGROUP's data centers. The IBM Power i machines are mirrored via BUS 400, the applications are virtualized on IBM x3650 m3 systems via VMware. This data is mirrored from Hilchenbach to the UBL data center using SNAP Mirror, where the data is also backed up on a tape library. The proven Citrix Terminal Services continue to ensure the connection of the various locations to the central data center and the provision of the data.
"The proof of concept gave us the security we needed to take this step," says Peter Pilz, Head of IT at SCHRAG Kantprofile GmbH. "On the one hand, it confirmed the concept of the new system environment and ensured a smooth migration of our applications and systems to the external DATAGROUP data center.
*Managed Services contract extended in 2015 (editor's note)
"In the event of future expansions, we now benefit from the rapid implementation, as the corresponding capacities are available.
The switch to DATAGROUP's managed services has been a complete success for us."