BASF

Success Story

BASF leverages Novell NetWare and eDirectory services to manage a dynamic, global enterprise

Overview

Founded in 1865 as "Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik AG," BASF today is one of the world's leading companies in the chemical industry. BASF offers its customers a high-performance range of products such as highly-refined chemicals, plastics, dyestuffs and pigments, dispersions, vehicle and industrial paints, pesticides as well as fine chemicals, oil and gas. BASF has 103,000 employees worldwide and approximately €36 billion in revenue.

Challenge

BASF requires a reliable network infrastructure to meet economic challenges and adapt quickly to new business requirements. To keep pace with high usage volumes and increasing storage requirements, BASF needed a solid, scalable infrastructure with storage area network (SAN) support and accompanying security. As with many large enterprises, BASF needed a solution to manage user profiles across multiple locations, and the ability to quickly adapt to employee transfers and re-organizations.

Novell solution

"We have tens of thousands of PCs relying on the network functions of NetWare. The administration of file, print and eDirectory services at top-quality levels and with the kind of volume we have at BASF is only possible for us by using NetWare."

Harald Enders
Network Services Manager,
BASF IT Services

BASF works in conjunction with BASF IT Services, an IT company operating on a pan-European basis to consolidate IT activities of individual BASF companies. BASF IT Services helps BASF manage networks and servers for more than 50,000 users at 250 sites throughout Europe.

BASF has relied on Novell NetWare to reliably manage its infrastructure for the past 10 years. The BASF Ludwigshafen location alone has 175 NetWare servers in operation, handling 5.6 terabytes of data for some 25,000 users. The remaining 240 sites across the BASF corporate network (BCN) connect an additional 106 NetWare servers with 7,500 users.

"NetWare runs without problems on a server platform with up to 2,000 users," explains Harald Enders, network services manager at BASF IT Services. "With NetWare, we have a very high reliability level. Countless servers have not crashed in years, and with so many users accessing a server, that is extremely important."

To accommodate a 40-70% annual increase in its need for storage capacity, BASF selected Novell Cluster Services for a cost-effective storage area network (SAN) solution. Novell Cluster service provides virtually uninterrupted access to critical storage resources and eliminates downtime related to server crashes and maintenance.

"The next evolutionary stage for BASF will be to optimize the strong growth that has taken place in the IT infrastructure and to adapt to meet future challenges," said Andreas Hohnschop, team leader of Directory Services. "With NetWare and Novell Cluster Services, along with the SAN support contained in them, we are ideally prepared for the future."

BASF also makes extensive use of Novell eDirectory, a corporate metadirectory that centralizes the administration of user profiles. BASF uses eDirectory to simplify administration of more than 40,000 users.

"The major advantage of eDirectory is the centralized remote administration of all servers, which is particularly important for our existing pan-European infrastructure," explains Hohnschop.

As with other global companies, BASF experiences constant change in its IT structure and relies on the flexibility of eDirectory. "An agile company like BASF inevitably experiences the sale of some divisions or the acquisition of others," said Enders. "With eDirectory, we can seamlessly transfer several thousands of users into a directory, or extract any number of them as an independent directory."

BASF administrators rely on eDirectory to easily transfer employees to different departments or divisions with a few mouse clicks. eDirectory allows administrators to follows such re-organizations within BASF and adapt to new conditions on the fly.

"We have tens of thousands of PCs relying on the network functions of NetWare," said Enders. "The administration of file, print and eDirectory services at top-quality levels and with the kind of volume we have at BASF is only possible for us by using NetWare."

BASF also uses Novell ZENworks for Desktops for cost-effective PC management. BASF plans to standardize its desktops across its European locations to decrease administration costs and improve staff efficiency.

Results

By using NetWare, BASF provides a reliable network infrastructure throughout its 250 offices that is scalable to accommodate future growth. With centralized management of users in eDirectory, the dynamic, global organization improves cross-company efficiencies and saves significant administrative time and costs.

"You can compare file, print and eDirectory services with gas, water and electricity," said Hohnschop. "Users don't ask where it all comes from, but rely on it being available around the clock. That is exactly why we rely on Novell technology."