Waagner-Biro Stahlbau AG

Success Story

By implementing Novell® Cluster Services, Waagner-Biro AG has significantly improved the availability and performance of its head-office file servers, ensuring that employees can share information more reliably. The company has also migrated from a Microsoft* solution to Novell GroupWise™, enhancing the flexibility, reliability and ease of management of its corporate e-mail service.

Overview

Waagner-Biro AG is an Austrian engineering company with 1,100 employees in 15 locations. The company specialises in steel-glass engineering, and has divisions offering bridge and stage engineering and installation. Waagner-Biro has won major awards for its work on high-profile engineering projects, including the Reichstag dome in Berlin and the Great Court of the British Museum

Challenge

Waagner-Biro has offices in 15 locations globally, including branch offices in the Middle East, and production facilities in the UK, Germany, Indonesia and Austria. The head office in Vienna provides each of these operations with centralised data storage facilities for backup purposes, and local offices mirror their data nightly to these facilities.

As data volumes grew, the performance and reliability of the existing storage solution began to deteriorate. It was clear that the solution would not scale to meet the company's future requirements.

For Waagner-Biro, round-the-clock availability of data is vital. The company is permanently engaged in complex, high-profile engineering projects, and must coordinate its activities with architecture and construction partners in order to meet tight deadlines. To support this demanding global business model, Waagner-Biro needed to refresh its storage solution, to gain higher levels of performance, availability and scalability.

Novell solution

"Novell Cluster Services offered exceptionally good performance and availability, building on our existing confidence in Novell technology."

Thomas Freudensprung
Deputy Head of IT Infrastructure
Waagner-Biro Stahlbau AG

Waagner-Biro selected Novell Cluster Services and engaged ITdesign, a Novell Gold Partner, to assist with the implementation. The Novell solution simplifies and reduces the cost of storage area network management, while delivering secure, uninterrupted access to critical data and applications.

The joint team implemented a three-node cluster in Waagner-Biro's Vienna head office, using NetApp* FAS3020 filer devices with high-performance fibre-channel interconnects. Two subsidiary locations each have a smaller NetApp FAS250 with SCSI disks, and the company uses NetApp SyncMirror software to handle data mirroring between the sites.

Much of the data from the former cluster was migrated ahead of time, so that the switch-over to the new solution required just four hours of scheduled downtime, keeping the impact on Waagner-Biro's operations to an absolute minimum.

"Novell Cluster Services offered exceptionally good performance and availability, building on our existing confidence in Novell technology," said Thomas Freudensprung, Deputy Head of IT Infrastructure, Waagner-Biro Stahlbau AG. "ITdesign helped us to ensure a well-planned, low-risk migration that was accomplished very rapidly."

The deployment of Novell Cluster Services was the second successful project handled by ITdesign: the partner also oversaw the migration of Waagner-Biro's corporate e-mail platform from a Microsoft solution to Novell GroupWise.

"Novell GroupWise offered fast and easy migration tools to help us move away from Microsoft, and the administrative effort to maintain the new solution is far lower," said Freudensprung. "Both this project and the introduction of Novell Cluster Services ran smoothly, and the expert technical assistance from IT Design helped minimise disruption."

ITdesign also helped Waagner-Biro implement Novell Access Manager, as part of an authentication solution that provides remote users with secure access to Citrix* services. These employees use RSA smartcard technology to confirm their identity to Novell Access Manager, which authenticates them against the directory of registered users.

"Using Novell Access Manager makes it fast and easy to enable secure access to internal resources," said Freudensprung. "The solution helps our remote project teams to stay productive wherever they are."

Waagner-Biro will use Novell GroupWise Mobile Server in the near future to extend e-mail and other services to employees' mobile phones.

Results

"Novell GroupWise gives us greater flexibility and ease of management for e-mail and collaboration services, and the software is also extremely robust."

Thomas Freudensprung
Deputy Head of IT Infrastructure
Waagner-Biro Stahlbau AG

Novell Cluster Services has significantly improved the availability of business-critical data at Waagner-Biro, providing a resilient file serving environment that can seamlessly recover from major hardware failures. The Novell solution also offers improved performance, enabling employees to access large files more rapidly.

"With Novell Cluster Services, we are more confident about keeping important business data available to global users at all times," said Freudensprung. "The automation of the solution means that it requires very little administrative effort, so our IT team can focus on supporting business users."

The Novell solution can support up to 32 servers per cluster, so the solution will easily scale to meet Waagner-Biro's future requirements - and new servers can be added non-disruptively.

Novell GroupWise is also helping Waagner-Biro to grow its business with minimal impact on day-to-day operations. The software makes it easy to set up e-mail services for temporary office locations, which is especially important in enabling teams working on construction sites to access shared data and communication services.

"Novell GroupWise gives us greater flexibility and ease of management for e-mail and collaboration services, and the software is also extremely robust," said Freudensprung. "With all the Novell software we use, the high quality tends to translate into low administrative effort and low cost of ownership."