Otto Stöckl Elektroinstallationen

Electrical engineering in Austria’s capital

Vienna-based company, Otto Stöckl Elektroinstallationen GmbH, has been providing building technology services, including the design and installation of electrical, building control, security and fire detection systems for more than 30 years. Specialising in the refurbishment of old buildings, the company has installed systems in a range of buildings, from office blocks to luxury mansions. Originally founded with only a handful of staff, Otto Stöckl has since grown to around 200 employees. As employee numbers grew, so too did the company’s IT environment, although in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Franz Pichler, authorised signatory at Otto Stöckl Elektroinstallationen GmbH, explains: “Our server landscape was very heterogeneous and temperamental. Failures had become an almost everyday occurrence – we needed to resolve the situation once and for all.”

Greater redundancy thanks to virtualisation

An ideal solution was offered by Fujitsu SELECT partner, IT Operations & Consulting GmbH, Vienna. According to Martin Hurka, Managing Director of IT Operations & Consulting GmbH: “The existing hardware at Otto Stöckl GmbH was nearing the end of its warranty period and needed updating. There was also a need for greater redundancy.” The Fujitsu partner therefore proposed a virtualisation concept based on VMware and a hardware cluster of three new PRIMERGY RX300 S7 servers. An ETERNUS DX80 S2 is the central storage system with a fast iSCSI connection to the servers. “We replaced the outdated backup system with an ETERNUS LT20,” continues Martin Hurka, “which we installed in the rack in combination with the existing PRIMERGY RX300 S6 server.” This tape storage system from Fujitsu, which is equipped with standardised LTO technology, produces a daily backup of all data from the ETERNUS DX80 S2 storage system. “All in all, the new IT environment has allowed Otto Stöckl to achieve much higher system availability as well as significant maintenance savings,” concludes Hurka.

Central storage for satellite offices

Of the 200 employees of Otto Stöckl Elektroinstallationen GmbH, only 60 actually work at the Vienna head office. “We design and install electrical systems for local authority housing, office buildings and private homes,” Franz Pichler advises. “A great number of our employees are therefore based at external offices on building sites.” These employees access the network used by the Otto Stöckl Elektroinstallationen GmbH head office from their laptops. In this regard too, the central storage of the new IT environment offers greater security. This is because, as Pichler explains, “data from the satellite offices is saved to our ETERNUS DX80 S2 storage system at night.” Since the data is no longer saved locally, the risk of it falling into the wrong hands or being lost is automatically reduced. “Our satellite offices do not therefore run a data privacy risk,” Pichler concludes.

Remote maintenance included

The Fujitsu SELECT Partner, which performs all IT maintenance activities for Otto Stöckl GmbH, also has remote access to all of the external offices. “Because the new IT environment at Otto Stöckl is much lower maintenance, the service costs have gone down,” explains Martin Hurka from IT Operations & Consulting GmbH. “Due to the robust nature and reciprocal failover capabilities of the three Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers at head office, we have been able to relax service times somewhat. An SLA with a four-hour recovery time is now only required for the storage system. In view of this, we have been able to offer Otto Stöckl very attractive service terms.“

Highly scalable and low maintenance

The improved redundancy is largely due to the virtualisation concept in place at Otto Stöckl. As Hurka explains: “All three PRIMERGY RX300 S7 servers are virtualised via VMware vSphere 5. If one of these servers should fail, the remaining two will be able to maintain operations without major limitations. In addition to improving redundancy, this also simplifies maintenance.” The virtualised environment also ensures that hardware resources are used much more efficiently in view of the fact that each virtual machine (VM) can be assigned to any server with a simple click of the mouse. And should Otto Stöckl Elektroinstallationen GmbH continue to grow, its IT systems will be able to grow with it because adding extra servers and/or storage resources couldn’t be easier. The ETERNUS DX80 S2 is also highly scalable. With an overall storage capacity of up to 360 terabytes, there is space for various hard disk types (including SAS, Nearline SAS and SSD). Franz Pichler couldn’t be happier overall:

“Failures that disrupted our work were a common occurrence with our old IT environment. With our new systems, we have been able to achieve a much more robust, highly redundant infrastructure. Our investment has therefore paid off and continues to do so on a daily basis. One very welcome side-effect has been the energy savings we have enjoyed thanks to our new IT landscape; we are now using around a third less energy overall.”

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