Volkswagen India shifts to NetApp storage solution

Volkswagen (VW) India wanted to build an IT infrastructure that was scalable, resilient, future proof, simple and easy to manage, while increasing functionality, availability, and security. Before selecting Mumbai based MIEL e-Security, as a solution provider, the company was using third party storage solution. However, it was facing issues while scaling up its storage capacity. After long deliberations, the company discussed their concerns with existing vendor and simultaneously it evaluated the NetApp solution. The company conducted a thorough evaluation in October 2010 and the actual order was released in June 2011. The most important feature that tilted the decision in NetApp's favor was the concept of MetroCluster.

"Our factory manufactures one car every 2 minutes. So, a downtime of 30 minutes would mean a loss of 15 cars and because of the nature of business, we do not have the opportunity to recover those cars," says Sameer Pise, CIO, Volkswagen India.

Volkswagen was already using EMC storage but faced issues while trying to expand their storage and hence EMC Vplex was MIEL's primary competitor. Major distinguishing factor for MIEL winning this project was field proven solution verses solution which does not have many deployments.

Volkswagen started discussion with MIEL team in October 2010 where Volkswagen team shared their pain points with MIEL and also their roadmap for next 3 years. Accordingly after doing a gap analysis of existing infrastructure, MIEL found that current infrastructure is not competent to cater to changing business dynamics. "We designed robust solution which can cater to business roadmap as well as integrate with existing setup seamlessly. Moreover, we also carried out proof of concept (POC) for checking features and benefits of proposed solution components. Upon successful POC, final BOQ was prepared and Volkswagen team later released the PO in May2011," says Amit Vyas head, product sales and strategic projects group, MIEL.

Since MIEL had initiated and designed this project. It had an upper edge as compared to all other competition which tried to get involved at later stage. Also in the entire project lifecycle, MIEL acted as trusted adviser to Volkswagen India team.

REQUIREMENT
Volkswagen India has two data centers, 1km apart, at their premises in Pune. These data centers primarily host applications concerned with the production of automobiles in the Pune assembly line. The main concern for Volkswagen India was to make the servers highly available across the two data centers, along with upgrading their infrastructure to cater to future needs. The requirement for Volkswagen India was that applications running in one data center should seamlessly transition to the other data center in case of failures. They also wanted to virtualize the physical servers so that servers could be better protected and easily ported. In addition, there was a need to consolidate servers belonging to the sales office in Mumbai from a hosted environment to the data center at Pune.

WHY NETAPP?
Sameer Prabhakar, manager, ITP and project sponsor, Volkswagen India says, "The decision to choose NetApp was that it offered a unified storage that could support both near and far disaster recovery, and could integrate tightly with VMware virtualized infrastructure. Moreover, NetApp storage also provided a rich feature set including snapshots, thin provisioning and deduplication. For Volkswagen India, these features, in addition to MetroCluster for DR were critical in the decision to move to NetApp storage."

SOLUTION DEPLOYED
First phase of implementation started in August 2011. As part of implementation project, MIEL team had extensively followed PMO to control the project supporting with detailed documentation. MIEL had implemented NetApp MetroCluster storage along with virtualization using VMware vSphere. MIEL is also helping Volkswagen team in implementation of Microsoft Clustering (MSCS) across data centers.

MIEL worked very closely in designing the solution and their experience with a wide variety of technologies such as IBM servers and VMware facilitated a smooth integration of the NetApp solution with Volkswagen's existing IT infrastructure. Their setup has two NetApp FAS3270 boxes with expandable I/O modules configured in Fabric MetroCluster. Currently 36 TB is con-figured, which is planned to be expanded to 90-100 TBs in the coming years. VMware vSphere 4.1 is also part of the solution. Volkswagen didn't have virtualization infrastructure earlier and hence adopting virtualization was also a major criteria in the solution.

MIEL designed the solution which includes NetApp MetroCluster storage providing shared storage across data center and VMware HA and vMotion has been configured on the same. The company used IBM servers for computing purpose. Currently, this infrastructure supports all the office servers, which are mix of Oracle/SQL servers with a plan to extend it to the core production critical servers.

Vyas says, "We designed a solution in such a way that, in case of a failure at any one data center, applications can seamlessly failover to the other data center without any administrative intervention; unlike other competitive replication solutions where the administrator needs to actually set up the replication infrastructure in terms of mirroring volumes. Because of the deployed solution, Volkswagen India is able to avoid expensive license cost for products like Symantec SF and VMware SRM, which also meant that it simplified the administration and eliminated potential failure points. Additionally, vMotion and Microsoft clustering solutions have been implemented across the data centers to achieve high availability."

KEY RESULTS
Implementing the solution in the new virtualized server environment has provided several business benefits to Volkswagen India such as:

Continuous data availability-Volkswagen India has been able to protect their critical data and achieve near DR at a reduced cost and complexity. Their mission-critical applications can seamlessly failover between data centers without any administrative intervention, except in case of a total site failure.

Server consolidation-Volkswagen India virtualized 63% of all their office servers, which resulted in a server consolidation ratio of 1:5. In addition, they migrated all the servers for their sales office in Mumbai to the data center in Pune, which in turn saved expensive hosting costs.

Improved storage utilization-Volkswagen India achieved a deduplication ratio of 40-44%. With NetApp storage and deduplication, they now utilize only 30% of the storage as against an 80% of storage utilization using traditional volumes and no deduplication earlier.

Lower capital costs-With deployed solution, Volkswagen India was able to build a scalable, resilient, future proof, simple and easy to manage infrastructure all the while increasing functionality, availability and very importantly savings costs. RTO values have improved dramatically from 8-12 hours to few minutes. RPO values have reduced from 24 hours to 8 hours.

Additionally, it also did cost savings on hardware, power, and cooling due to server consolidation, as the extra servers and hardware are now used for other purposes, resulting in costs savings on servers and hardware. Almost two server racks are now available for reuse. Moreover, Volkswagen India saved on license costs by deploying storage based replication products (NetApp MetroCluster). NetApp products integrated well with VMware and Microsoft clustering produced and helped reduce complexity as well as the number of failure points.

"We achieved 42% savings on power and cooling, quicker provisioning times, backup and recovery times. Traditionally, it would take weeks to identify or purchase a new server and then provision it, and the server resources were not utilized efficiently. Now, it takes only minutes to provision a new server," says Prabhakar.

Additionally, storage based cloning (NetApp Flex­Clone) technology helps replicate data volumes to create test environments in a matter of minutes without wasting storage and compromising on performance. Snapshots taken on file level data (NAS) can now be used for restoring user data instantly without any administrative intervention.

MIEL completed the implementation well before project timeline due to excellent project handling. The project implementation was completed in 2011 December.