No Board Without Bytes: Storage Modernization in the Timber Mill

Background

From the tree trunk to the finished roof truss: Ladenburger Holzwerke processes more than 800,000 cubic meters of wood annually at a total of four locations—enough for around 40,000 roof trusses. In Kerkingen, the primary aim is to turn round into squares: round timber is sawn, dried and refined at the sites into solid construction timber (KVH) or glued laminated timber (BSH), among other things.

The material use of wood as a raw material is clearly in the foreground, as it ensures the highest added value and long-term CO₂ binding. In the end, for example, ready-to-set roof trusses or wooden slats and elements for facades are created, which carpenters assemble like a kit. What cannot be used as a material is consistently recycled: wood recyclables flow into pellet production —100 percent from by-products of the company's own production—and into the company's own biomass combined heat and power plant. Together with photovoltaics, Ladenburger thus generates renewable electricity on site and makes full use of the raw material wood in terms of resources.

The medium-sized company operates a highly digitalized production environment in Geithain near Leipzig and at three locations in East Württemberg—in Bopfingen, Aufhausen and Kerkingen. Saws, carpentry machines and logistics systems work in a networked manner. An ERP system and SQL databases control all processes. If the IT fails, the value chain comes to a standstill: no forklift driver knows where the wood is supposed to go. No machine receives its control data. Customer orders are left behind.

Challenge: Old Storage, New Requirements

Exactly such scenarios threatened in Bopfingen, Aufhausen and Kerkingen. The previous storage hardware was in use for around eight years. Support contracts and warranties expired. At the same time, Ladenburger has grown strongly in recent years, so that the demands on IT have also increased, especially in the area of automation. "We have digitized more and more processes and needed more computing and storage capacity. At the same time, we introduced a new, more powerful ERP system. The existing storage infrastructure could no longer keep pace with these developments," recalls Benno Stark, Deputy Head of IT and responsible for infrastructure and cyber resilience at Ladenburger.

The consequences were evident in day-to-day business: database queries were slow, the ERP system reacted sluggishly. The latency was high, the available resources were exhausted. In the production hall at the Bopfingen site, for example, the evening backup put such a heavy load on the SQL database server that the higher-level production control system no longer received any data and production processes came to a standstill.

Solution: Storage without Fibre Channel Complexity

The IT team was looking for a new storage solution. Ladenburger first defined what the new storage had to do: high performance, easy scalability and storage space with sufficient buffer for the coming years. The tender went to several regional and national IT service providers. The contract was awarded to Fornax GmbH from Lauchheim. "The overall concept based on the Huawei OceanStor Dorado 3000 convinced Ladenburger with its performance data and price-performance ratio in equal measure," says Robert Weber, Managing Director of Fornax GmbH.

First, Fornax configured Huawei's hardware at its own site in Lauchheim. The service provider then installed the systems in Ladenburger's server rooms – during ongoing production operations. The team migrated less critical virtual machines during the day, business-critical SQL databases and file servers on weekends. The employees in production and administration did not notice anything about the changeover.

At all three locations, Fornax installed two identical OceanStor Dorado 3000 in separate fire compartments. If a storage system fails, the respective storage twin takes over the entire service almost in real time. Huawei's storage systems communicate directly with the servers running Ladenburger's virtual machines (VMs). This eliminates the need for an additional network layer of Fibre Channel switches, which is necessary for many storage solutions. This means: less hardware, low power consumption, no special knowledge for configuration and maintenance – and thus lower running costs.

Pros: Backup in 30 Minutes Instead of Hours

The new infrastructure pays off most clearly when it comes to backups. Whereas the data backup at the three locations had previously taken several hours, it now runs in just under 30 to 90 minutes per location—without any noticeable impact on ongoing operations. For business-critical systems, the IT team is even planning a more granular rhythm—only possible due to the strong storage performance. The system creates snapshots of individual virtual machines in seconds instead of minutes as before.

"Thanks to Immutable snapshots at the storage level of the OceanStor Dorado 3000, we now also have another resilience layer in parallel to our established backup solution," reports Benno Stark. In addition, end users benefit from noticeably shorter response times in the ERP system and in office applications. Behind the scenes, reduced latency ensures that SQL database queries are answered much faster.

In addition to performance, Ladenburger gains more flexibility: The OceanStor Dorado 3000 comes with integrated deduplication that gets much more out of the available storage space. At the same time, the system is more compact than its predecessor and takes up less space in the server room. If Ladenburger needs more capacity in the future, new panels can be retrofitted quickly and cost-effectively. In this way, Ladenburger can also meet new requirements quickly and reliably—whether it is about further automation or the use of artificial intelligence.