manroland AG
manroland is the world’s second largest manufacturer and distributor of webfed and sheetfed offset presses which provide tailor-made solutions for publishing, commercial, and packaging printing, from brochures to newspapers with circulations figures running into the millions. The company also provides customized 24/7 service and maintenance packages, integrated services and training, software products and workflow management systems.
The Challenge
The manroland data centre in the Augsburg plant houses the systems that are used for all the plant’s functions, from production support and high-performance CAD for product design, to email, finance and other business operations. The existing VMware virtualised or HP UX based serversystems were using a HDS storage system but Manager of IT Infrastructure Peter Brechtel and his team found the storage system lacking in performance. Specifically in support of the CAD system, the frequent poor performance levels were causing frustration. The team also knew that the system couldn’t support their goals for moving the IT department forward as issues with scalability and reliability had been identified and the inability to mirror all the data from manroland would pose problems. There was no chance for enhancement with the existing HDS storage systems. In late 2008, the team identified several requirements for a new storage infrastructure, with the low level of performance topping the list. In order to address the issue, the new business requirements were shared with several vendors.
“It was very important that we achieved an improved level of performance and reliability,“ said Brechtel, “but we also needed to ensure there would be the ability in the new system to easily increase capacity and to completely mirror the entire system for fast recovery in the event of a system failure.”
The Solution
“We were really impressed with Pillar Data Systems from the very beginning,” Brechtel added. “Of all the vendors we contacted, it was Pillar that answered all our questions quickly, completely and in writing. The professional approach that the team demonstrated, through-out the entire process was simply excellent.”
As the relationship started on such a positive note, manroland placed an immediate order with Pillar Data Systems to purchase two Pillar Axiom 600 systems, each with two Pillar Slammers and 16x300GB Fibre Channel Brick data enclosures. The system also included the FalconStor Virtualisation Solution, and synchronous mirroring with FalconStor NSS between the Augsburg data centre and the disaster recovery system located at a second location. Brechtel also signed up to Pillar’s guarantee of high performance and high availability.
“Pillar was the only vendor who gave a 5-9s guarantee,” Brechtel said. “We thought it was significant that they agreed to guarantee certain levels in a real production environment as opposed to laboratory conditions.” | 
United Kingdom
