Companies looking to survive in this aggressive market-place need to pursue a well-defined, long-term market strategy accompanied by the investment required for its execution. Nordmilch has invested continuously not only in improving the standards and quality of its  branded products but also in the quality of its technology and production facilities including, of course, its IT.

State-of-the-Art Software, State-of-the-Art Platforms

Nordmilch emerged at the end of the 90s as the result of a merger of several northern German dairy companies. An initial task was to agree both on a standard business software platform and on a modern platform as a basis for the new company's IT. Nordmilch opted for SAP R/3 based on an Informix database and running on Solaris. In order to meet the requirements of over 700 online R/3 users between Schleswig in the North and Kassel in the South (approx. 450 km) as well as from the border with the Netherlands in the West to Berlin in the East (again approx. 450 km) there was an obvious need for a powerful server. The tender offered by COMPAREX, the leading Systems Integrator, was selected by Nordmilch and a Sun E10000 was installed in mid-2.000 as today´s platform for SAP R/3. The system's four domains are divided into four partitions: two application, one database and a test server.

Protecting Servers against the High Costs of Outage

Nordmilch always awards high availability solutions top priority. Karl-Heinz Mansholt, Chief Information Officer at Nordmilch IT explains: "In a distributed environment such as ours total availability of the system is of the utmost importance. All applications across the enterprise depend on this - not only office and admin. applications but critical business processes such as production and logistics. By implementing first-class solutions for both servers and storage, COMPAREX has helped us achieve our goals. The implementation of the Foundation Suite-Software from their partner Veritas involved clustering the Sun servers in our primary data centre with the Sun servers in the secondary data centre. Should a hardware failure or operating system outage occur then the failover mechanisms ensure that the application will continue to run on the secondary server. This is absolutely vital in our environment as the ensuing costs of downtimes are incalculable."

Storage Networking - a Prerequisite

In the case of high availability solutions all systems - independent of geographical location and at any time - need to access the data they require. A SCSI connection would not have been able to bridge the 500m distance between Nordmilch's two data centres. COMPAREX, therefore, designed and implemented a Storage Area Network for Nordmilch. COMPAREX Fibre Channel Directors now enable all of the servers to transcend the confines of the data centre and access any storage system at speeds of up to 100 MB/s. The enhanced flexibility that storage networking provides is the prerequisite for a high availability architecture.

Data Backup, Data Protection

After the successful completion of the project designed to secure application availability, Nordmilch and COMPAREX went on to design a system to guarantee data availability - a combination of solutions from two of COMPAREX' partners, Veritas and EMC.

Business Continuance

COMPAREX installed and implemented a Symmetrix storage system in each of Nordmilch´s two data centres. The data within each system is mirrored via RAID1 and also remotely between the two systems via EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility. Thus Nordmilch guards not only against a disk crashing but also against the failure of a complete system, or a complete data centre outage even.

Simplified Backup

Backup procedures have been considerably simplified by the introduction of EMC's TimeFinder. This software feature enables fast and uncomplicated duplication of data onto so-called Business Continuance Volumes (BCV). These copies can then be used for any number of different purposes such as testing or backup without interrupting production processes. Nordmilch exploited this functionality when converting to the Euro and uses it today for testing and backups. The copy is made non-disruptively and then backed up with the duplicated data being written to the COMPAREX tape library. Thus, productivity is enhanced as the applications are still available to users during backup runs and backups can now also be made at any time of the day.

LANfree with NetBackup

When system partners were invited to bid for the implementation of new backup procedures, COMPAREX tendered a comprehensive design which Nordmilch found convincing. The management software installed at that time regularly ran into problems with Informix, with the installed Library and with the Sun E10000. These problems were solved when COMPAREX implemented NetBackup. Karl-Heinz Mansholt is pleased to comment: "Everything runs smoothly today. The user networks no longer have to cope with the extra traffic as we now back our data up across the SAN and not across the LAN. Scheduling on the E3500 Backup-Server automates backups, obviating the need for manual intervention. Thanks to the measures we have adopted there has been no need for a genuine Restore and the Restore tests we carried out with COMPAREX using the Veritas software were all completed successfully."