Siegen. Quality, reliability and speed are important not only for the customers of Heinrich Eibach GmbH but they are also criteria for Eibach’s internal infrastructure. Thus, the data centre was recently enhanced technically by up-to-date blade server, fibre-channel SAN, high availability RAID systems and consistent virtualization. This modernization includes also a new concept for data archiving in conjunction with the document management system by PoINT Archiver on scalable hard disk systems. The old UDO jukebox, which has already been part of the previous solution, is reasonably used as replication device with additional offline media production in the new solution architecture.

Heinrich Eibach GmbH, situated in Finnentrop, enjoys a world-wide reputation as a leading manufacturer of Performance Suspension Springs, -Components and -Systems and Hi-Tech Industrial Springs. Successful Formel 1, DTM, NASCAR or Indy-Car Series teams and drivers rely on Eibach and its products.
To increase reliability and ensure availability of company data, Eibach lately carried out a consolidation of its infrastructure. Therefore, state-of-the-art blade server, fibre-channel SAN, high availability RAID systems and a consistent virtualization were used. To utilize these preferences even for the document management including archiving, Eibach opt for PoINT Archiver. This software solution enables network-wide, automated file archiving. With the help of a user friendly wizard, the user sets rules defining those files which are to be archived, migrated or deleted. The product installation and staff training was carried out by PoINT Software & Systems GmbH based in Siegen. The company has specialized in the development of software products and system solutions for storage and administration of data on all available mass storage devices like hard disks, tape or optical media.

The existing document management system was migrated to a virtualized server in the course of the consolidation. The DMS containers are stored in a directory on the SAN RAID system. Already closed containers are archived on a separated and more economic area of the RAID system. PoINT Tiered Archive File System (TAFS) protects this against changes. To save hard disk space, this special configuration was designed in a way that container can afterwards be replaced by a link (“Reparse Point”), too. As PoINT Archiver supports all storage technologies (hard disk, tape, optical storage) the existing UDO jukebox could be integrated reasonably in the new archive concept. The additionally stored data are excluded from the daily backup which improves backup times and reduces required hard disk and tape capacity.

The new archiving solution offers far more functionality than the superseded one. At the same time, the easily operated PoINT Archiver can be administered explicitly more efficient. Thanks to PoINT Archiver, the decision to purchase an effective and high availability SAN RAID was not hard to make for Eibach Federn, because the consolidated storage can now handle all incurring assignments of a modern data centre. Furthermore, it is prepared for future expansions.