Wentzel Dr. : All Flash Storage for a Fail-safe Storage Environment
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Chic industrial loft, modern maisonette or cosy terraced house: Anyone looking for their dream property will find what they need in the sales department of the Wentzel Dr. Group. Since 1820, the Hamburg-based company has sold and rented out both houses and apartments as well as commercial real estate.
The Group employs around 280 people. The Real Estate Management looks after real estate throughout Germany. The employees take care of the properties, conclude rental agreements and track current rental income, coordinate construction projects, repairs or renovations. This involves a wealth of correspondence every day, which the Hamburg-based team have already fully digitised since 2014. An important prerequisite for successful digitalization in the company is a stable and secure IT infrastructure.
The managers at Wentzel Dr. see digitalization as an opportunity to be more productive and stand out on the market. Digital processes paid off during the coronavirus pandemic in particular: Requests and appointments could be managed digitally; interested parties could visit houses or apartments virtually. At the same time, Wentzel Dr. is digitising more and more processes. For example, around 1,500 invoices arrive every day, of which around 600 are still sent by regular mail. They land in the central inbox, where they are scanned and then processed in the digital document management system (DMS). The challenge: As digitalization progresses, the amount of data that needs to be managed and stored securely is constantly increasing.
To manage the data flood in a highly available IT environment, the real estate company previously used hard disk storage based on hard disk drives (HDD) in its own data centre. When it became clear that their storage space would soon no longer be sufficient and should therefore be replaced after six years, the Wentzel Dr. IT department looked for an alternative.
It quickly became clear that the replacement of the old solution must also entail a change in technology. Wentzel Dr. wanted to say goodbye to the previous disk storage and introduce an all-flash-based storage area network (SAN) instead.
Before moving to the new storage world, the IT department remembered a call from Huawei’s sales team well a year ago, which had highlighted Huawei’s storage solutions. Wentzel Dr. got in touch, expressed interest and received the all-flash Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 model to try out in the company's own infrastructure. The real estate specialist’s IT team transferred some of the company’s data and put the storage solution through its paces in a Proof of Concept (PoC). After an eight-week test phase, it was clear that Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 fits the company’s requirements very well.
To ensure a fail-safe storage environment, Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 has been used in parallel with another provider’s solution since autumn 2022. Both all-flash systems mirror data continuously. If one SAN fails, the other takes over immediately. The Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 serves as an active standby and thus as a one-to-one backup for the storage environment. There is a total of 50 terabytes of data in the storage environment, including user and administrative data, as well as photos or videos of rental properties, damage reports and construction projects.
With the new all-flash storage environment, Wentzel Dr. is prepared for the future. Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 is based on modern technologies and uses artificial intelligence, for example, to indicate that the solid state disk (SSD) storage space is running low or that maintenance should be initiated. A further advantage: "Huawei offers everything from a single source. Huawei manufactures the processors, designs and develops the SSDs and has its own operating system. As a customer, we can be sure that all storage components are coordinated and work seamlessly," says Jelle Schefuß from the Wentzel Dr. IT department.
The new all-flash SAN also scores points with higher performance and more capacity. The switch increased IOPS performance (Input/Output Operations Per Second), allowing data to be stored and retrieved faster than before. The model can also be flexibly expanded thanks to additional SSD slots - so the real estate specialist can optimally manage the increasing data volume in the coming years. "With the All-Flash SAN, we have a lot of room to develop the digitalization and development of our company. We have a good starting point for further growth over the next five years," says Schefuß.
Last but not least, the new storage landscape is more energy-efficient: Unlike traditional hard drives, SSDs consume less power. This is partly because they do not have any rotating parts that consume energy. They also generate less heat and therefore require less cooling than HDDs. According to Schefuß, this has enabled the company to reduce electricity costs in the storage area by a third. An important argument - especially in light of volatile energy prices.
From the marketing idea for successful sales to long-term property management and tenant support: As one of the largest owner-managed real estate companies in Germany, Wentzel Dr. manages several thousand residential and commercial units. The geographical focus is on the Hamburg region, with branches in 20 additional German cities.
For more information, visit: https://www.wentzel-dr.de/