Lammering & Huawei Partner ICT GmbH: Secure Storage with Extensive Backup

Steel and plant engineering, sanitary and heating wholesale, insulating glass production and glass refining - the Arnold Lammering Group is a versatile, traditional and constantly expanding medium-sized company from Schüttorf in Lower Saxony. The fourth-generation family-owned company has several subsidiaries, 25 locations and around 800 employees.

The medium-sized company operates the IT infrastructure for all divisions of the Group at its headquarters in Schüttorf, where the team in Lower Saxony has two redundant server rooms. The central infrastructure serves as a backbone for all business processes for the entire Group: From the online shop to the control of industrial systems and office applications and ERP systems. All locations have access via VPN connection.

When it comes to IT and data centres, the family-owned company has relied on the locally based Huawei partner ICT GmbH from Salzbergen for many years. The IT service provider supports medium-sized companies in particular with the equipment of data centres and networks. In addition, ICT focuses on information security in customer solutions.

Data recovery comes top of mind for expanding business

The Arnold Lammering Group is home to several growing divisions, which means that ever larger amounts of data must be managed in the central data centre. The company has also introduced several powerful ERP systems in the various subsidiaries in recent years, which require corresponding computing capacity. Since then, the medium-sized company has already expanded its server landscape significantly. However, there was still catching up to do, especially with regard to storage, data backup and recovery. Transferring large amounts of data from the hybrid storage system to the servers proved to be a disruptive bottleneck in the recovery process. "In the event of a ransomware attack, we would no longer have been well positioned with our existing storage solution. The recovery of backup data would have taken too long and would have hit business-critical processes," explains Lars Luwig, Head of IT System Administration at Lammering. The ambitious requirement of the Lammering Group for the new storage system: Recovery power of eleven terabytes per hour to get backups of all data up and running quickly in case of an emergency. "We tested several hardware solutions, but not all met the required performance. Our IT partner ICT GmbH finally suggested a promising Huawei solution," says Nils Markert, IT system administrator at Lammering. "During the proof-of-concept in May, 2023 we were faced with a challenging task of ensuring the recovery of the large amount of data. However, with the high-performance hardware from Huawei, we were able to deliver the right, individual solution for Lammering," says Stefan Breulmann, Technical Manager and part of the management team at ICT GmbH.

Duo of Oceanstor Dorado 5000 systems go hand in hand with OceanProtect for primary storage and back up

As a new storage unit, ICT GmbH installed one Huawei OceanStor Dorado 5000 unit in each of Arnold Lammering’s two server rooms as of June 2023. Just like the mirrored servers, the storage units are thus also mutually protected by the dual design and spatial separation. The Huawei OceanStor Dorado systems provide the primary storage for the daily live operation of the servers and use the 100 Gigabit/s transport protocol RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet). The protocol is faster than transmissions via Fibre Channel and iSCSI and passes the speed of the NVMe (Nonvolatile Memory Express/Solid State Drive) hard disks to the server without losses. The result: Fastest possible connection of primary storage to the server landscape. Four Huawei CloudEngine switches per server room form the necessary 100-gigabit connection between storage and server to implement the RoCE protocol.

An OceanProtect X6000 from Huawei is used as backup. Using secure snapshot technology, the backup solution secures the data sets and protects them against access by ransomware according to the WORM principle (Write Once, Read Many). “The secure snapshot function writes a copy once, which can then only be read and no longer changed for a specified period of time, and effectively protects data assets against encryption trojans,” explains ICT Managing Director Breulmann.

Future proofed and well-positioned for data growth and scale up

Since November 2023, the Arnold Lammering Group has operated Huawei’s new storage and backup - optimally integrated by ICT GmbH into the backup software architecture that Lammering purchases from a third-party provider. And benefits from a resilient backup system with secure snapshot technology and a recovery capacity of eleven TB/h. "We are not only well-equipped for emergencies. The modern storage environment has also enabled us to reduce access times in live operation," reports Lars Luwig. For example, the sanitary division performs an automatic price calculation for its customers once a month. In contrast to the old solution, the new IT infrastructure can handle the complex calculation run in two days instead of five. The Arnold Lammering Group is now also better positioned for further data growth, as the storage capacity in the Huawei controllers can be scaled much more flexibly and economically. "In the past, we had to buy an entire shelf, even if we only wanted to add a few terabytes. Now we can simply add the hard drives we need and develop much more straightforwardly," says Nils Markert. Lammering also benefits from the high-performance RoCE protocol as a future-proof solution that provides the company with high bandwidths, low latencies and reduced CPU utilisation of the servers in the backup area. New storage, modern switches and fast transfer: The best prerequisites for successfully continuing the long history of the company.

Managing directors of ICT (from left to right): Helmut Hindriks, Jannik Hindriks, Stefan Breulmann

About Arnold Lammering

Arnold Lammering GmbH is an expanding specialist wholesaler in the fields of steel and building accessories, sanitary and heating, as well as tiles.

The fourth-generation family-owned company also includes several subsidiaries, such as Bentheimer Stahl- und Hallenbau GmbH & Co. KG with its core business of industrial construction, steel construction and plant engineering, as well as Flintermann Isolierglas GmbH & Co. KG and Flintermann Glasveredelungs GmbH, which cover a wide range of products and processing types in the field of glass and are among the world’s leading companies in glass processing and glass refining.

The Arnold Lammering Group has 25 locations in Germany and the Netherlands with around 800 employees. The headquarters is located in Schüttorf, Lower Saxony.

For more information, visit: https://www.lammering.de/

About ICT GmbH

ICT GmbH has been the precise partner for medium-sized companies when it comes to the availability, security and performance of data for more than 25 years. Huawei’s partner company specialises in data centres, corporate networks and information security.

For more information, visit: https://i-c-t.de

The headquarters of IT service provider ICT in Salzbergen, Lower Saxony