Hansen Transmissions Implements Network-Attached Storage, Improves Data Storage Performance and Fulfills Disaster Recovery Needs
 
 

Hansen Transmissions Implements Network-Attached Storage, Improves Data Storage Performance and Fulfills Disaster Recovery Needs

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Hansen Transmissions International NV is an industry leading, globally established designer, manufacturer and supplier of reliable, tailor-made gearboxes for wind turbines. Customers incorporate the company’s highly efficient and reliable gearboxes into multimegawatt wind turbines, deployed across the globe in high-profile onshore and offshore wind farm projects.

Hansen Transmissions has a manufacturing presence in Belgium, India, and China, as well as worldwide sales and service operations. It nurtures strong research and development operations and partnerships to maintain its technological leadership.

Hansen Transmissions wanted to replace its existing and out-of-date storage infrastructure with a solution that could deliver high performance access, modular scalability and more efficient management. This was needed since the company faces a steady growth in large data files, such as research and development designs for gearboxes in wind turbines, which need to be easy to store and fast to retrieve by the company’s engineers and developers.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Hansen Transmissions

  • “Thanks to Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage we are ready for the future. We can easily scale for data capacity growth without having to compromise on performance.” – Marnix Maes, Corporate Director Information Technology, Hansen Transmissions

  • Upgrade the existing storage infrastructure to a high performance storage solution, required to increase the company’s storage capacity and lower the complexity and time needed to manage the storage infrastructure
  • Reduce costs by setting up an efficient, modularly scalable and future-proof storage solution, with the ability to replicate an identical solution in a different setting for disaster recovery reasons
  • Lower the management complexity and the maintenance time needed for the complete storage infrastructure, while simultaneously delivering scalable and easy-to-install extra storage capacity
  • Improve applications workload on corporate file, print and mail services to gain efficiency
  • Improve the performance of data storage so that especially large files, such as research and development plans or e-mail archives, can be stored and retrieved faster
  • Implement the new storage solution and migrate all existing data without interrupting day-to-day business and concurrently set-up a disaster recovery plan using replication and cloning

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Upgraded the existing storage infrastructure to two identical Sun ZFS Storage 7120 appliances, resulting in a significant improvement in capacity and performance and allowing disaster recovery through replication on the identical second appliance that is housed in another Hansen Transmissions plant
  • Reduced costs by using the Sun ZFS Storage 7120 Appliances as an alternative for more expensive back-up solutions through compression of data that is less often retrieved, resulting in a two- to three-time reduction of required disk capacity
  • Gained a significant amount of extra floor space in the datacenter and lowered the time for maintenance and management of the solution by almost 50% through the use of integrated storage management tools
  • Migrated nearly 10 to 15 terabytes of data without business disruption and concurrently set-up a disaster recovery solution through replication and cloning functionalities, allowing Hansen Transmissions to retrieve vital data, such as research and development designs for gearboxes in wind turbines, and be up and running within minutes should there be a failure due to a disaster

Implementation Process

The complete implementation of both Sun ZFS Storage appliances was done in a short period of time, after an extensive pilot project that proved the performance gain.

Partner

 Axio systems helped Hansen Transmissions with every step of the project, starting from the proof of concept, through the pilot project and the actual implementation and migration of the existing data. Axio is also responsible for maintenance and fine-tuning of the new storage solution.

Resources

Hansen Transmissions Improves Server Performance by More Than 300% with Infrastructure Upgrade