CASE HISTORY MADDALENA SPA 

THE CREATION OF A SECOND DATA CENTER

Maddalena relied on NT New Technologies team's advices for the enlargement of the business ICT infrastructure.
A second data center was created and connected to the existing data center: more performances, redundancy and network connectivity up to 10/40 GB for more business data security and processes' productivity.

WHERE IT ALL STARTED
In a phase of business extenstion in line with the introduction of new products, the need for a more secure Informatic Infrastructure became predominant to efficientely and securely support the growing business activities and data.
The following are some of the main objectives to be considered:
-           business continuity to guarantee the total operativity of the business processes in every situation, as well as the full integrity and availability of the info;
-           flexibility and service to have an adequate IT infrastructure, built on the business needs and easily expandible in line with the demands' changes;
-           costs under control both in the implementation phase but mostly in the future maintanance of the solution.
Maddalena's high standard certifications should be taken into consideration: ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 17025.

THE SOLUTION

The expansion of the ICT infrastructure was organized through the implementation of a second data center, completely redundant with the one existing and located in a new wing of the headquarter.

This gave the opportunity to guarantee the business continuity requested by the client. The two locations, distant just 150 meters one from the other, are connected between them with optical fibre according to multiple and redundant routes: 40 gigabit ethernet back-end for the storage, 10 gigabit ethernet front-end for the LAN. For the extension process, more than 7km of optical fibre cables were laid out.

At the moment, the infrastructure includes 60 virtual machines distributed on 3 nodes VMWare and 58TB of data dismissed but already addressed to growth with the new applications and the new systems under implementation.

The customer's request of not being bound to hardware from specific vendors, to dynamically manage the perfroming needs while maintaining under control the costs brought to the software-defined storage choice of DataCore SANSymphony. It gave the opportunity to maxime the performance and the availability of the Informatic Infrastructure, guaranteeing flexibility and high reliability requested by the productive lines and by the certifications possessed by the company. The SANSymphony solution, in particular, envisages the storage virtualization with the dynamic management of disk space and services. 

NT New Technologies assisted the client in all the stages: starting from an analysis of the existing situation to the planning consultation, the furnishing and implementation steps of the hardware and software components until the after sales services - better known as customer care. Thanks to the expertise of the technical team of NT while dealing in "enterprise business critical environments" and to the peculiarities of the server and SAN virtualization technologies offered, the whole installation and migration happened in a climate of operative continuity, with no malfunction registered.

BENEFITS

Maddalena has now a complete ICT infrastructure, perfectly able to react to the actual productive and growing demands. This new setup fully guarantees the rispect of the high standards of the ISO certifications plus, it will have the opportunity to take advantage of the savings collected during the purchase phase, even in the management of the whole infrastructure and in the update of the new architecture. The flexibility and simplicity in the maintanance and expansion of the new architecture had been particularly appreciated. The business data guaranteed the redundancy of the two data centers: the risk of productive blocks or of loss of data had been reduce to a minimum level. Furthermore, the system was projected to guarantee continuity with no breakdowns, while maintaining efficiently intervention times in case of malfunctions, within a couple of seconds.