Austria's DPI Holding Upgrades Its Data Center with OceanStor Dorado

An innovative Austrian print and communication service provider, DPI Holding has approximately 8000 customers spread across four European countries. Turning over €70 million annually, the company — as is true for almost every business operating today — depends on a stable, highly-available, and performant central Information Technology (IT) system to keep its customers happy. But it only has a limited number of IT technicians, who are tasked with looking after complex internal stakeholder needs spread across a total of 11 physical sites. So, with the company set on growth, it began looking for a storage solution upgrade, in order to accommodate increasing demand.

Building Reliability

DPI solution

The company operates two data centers located in different Austrian cities, the capital Vienna and Vöcklabruck, an administrative center in western Upper Austria. With each site home to two devices physically separated by some 100 m — an active-active solution that builds in reliability. — the immediate goals of the upgrade focused on ease-of-use, seeking to cut data center complexity and reduce the physical footprint, moving on from legacy hybrid storage arrays with DataCore storage hypervisor appliances, to Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash systems with integrated HyperMetro, Huawei's active-active storage solution. In addition, DPI Holding wanted reliable, smooth, and fast warranty service support so that, if a Solid-State Drive (SSD) were to fail, for example, that information would be available immediately and proactively. This is something that Huawei is more than equipped to provide.

Clear Benefits

The project kicked off in the middle of 2020 and new systems were ordered by the end of the year. Delivery began in early 2021 and implementation happened straight away. Four sets of Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 all-flash storage were chosen, two for synchronous replication within Vienna and two for Vöcklabruck. In addition, OceanStor 2200 and 2600 hybrid flash products were selected for backup.

With all technical criteria met, benefits soon became clear to DPI Holding: general power consumption fell to five times less than the legacy system, for example, a huge step toward building cost-efficient, greener IT infrastructure. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) also fell by a factor of three, freeing resources to be spent on other core tasks. In terms of performance, latency fell below 0.5 ms, six times faster than the legacy system, accelerating the company's key tasks. And Huawei eService, an intelligent cloud Operations and Maintenance (O&M) platform, brings with it powerful prediction tools, monitoring both performance levels and capacity, improving troubleshooting from hours to just seconds.

Lower power consumption. Faster speeds. Far more efficient O&M. What kind of business would say no to any of that?