HPE M0S95A Product Data Sheet
Tropical Islands
increases business
Case Study
Objective
A high-availability, scalable and
easy to manage storage infrastructure
that is available 24 hours a day,
7 days a week and can cope with
rapid company growth
Approach
Initial comparison of various
technologies and products from
dierent manufac turers before
opting for HPE 3PAR StoreServ
and arxes-tolina GmbH, an IT systems
house that oers full migration
IT Matters
• Simple to manage the entire
data centre environment via
an end-to-end HPE solution
• High availability safeguarded during
migration by arxes-tolina GmbH
Business Matters
• Stable, seamless 24x7 operation
of business processes ensured by
transparent failover function in the
HPE 3PAR StoreServ system
• Highly scalable storage infrastructure
supports future company growth
and plans
• Business customers can be provided
with IT capacity thanks to the
multi-client capability of the
HPE 3PAR StoreServ system
process availability
Leisure resort upgrades to scalable
HPE 3PAR StoreServ system
Challenge
24x7 high-availability IT for guests
Tropical Islands is Europe’s largest tropical
holiday resort. Spanning 66,000 square
metres, one of the world’s largest cantilever
halls houses a unique destination that is
open all year round and does not depend
on the weather. This includes the world’s
largest indoor rainforest, the “South Sea”,
the “Lagoon” and a tropical village.
The accommodation is also unique: in the
middle of the tropical landscape, visitors will
find around 200 comfortable rooms and
lodges as well as the Rainforest and Sunset
Camp with 130 tents. The Tropical Islands
camp site, mobile home park and holiday
homes are also close by. More than one
million people visit the resort each year, and
the number is increasing as Tropical Islands
continues to expand.
A new outdoor area of more than
35,000 square metres is currently
under construction, and there are plans
to build a hotel with a conference centre.
Guests move around the resort using
a chip that opens the doors to their rooms
and wardrobes and is also used to pay for
food, drink and services. “If our data centre
were to fail, the services open to our guests
would be severely restricted, which is why
high availability and redundancy are
essential – around the clock, 365 days
a year,” explains Thomas Volmer, IT
Manager at Tropical Islands.
At Tropical Islands, Oracle Hospitality
products are used for hotel management,
points-of-sale and distribution processes.
The data centre also runs SAP applications,
several databases, a large server farm with
a VMware cluster and file services, including
image and video data. The company
currently has a total data volume of
around 45 terabytes.
Case study
Tropical Islands
Industry
Leisure resort
Page 2
Customer at a glance
Application
Oracle Hospitality
Hardware
• 2 x HPE 3PAR StoreServ 7400
2-node storage basis, each with
72 x 900 GB SAS 10k
• 4 x HPE SN SB6000B Fibre
Channel switches with 16 Gbit/s
Software
• VMware vSphere
arxes-tolina GmbH
arxes-tolina GmbH is an
international IT system
house that oers high-quality,
tried-and-tested solutions
from a single source. Based
in Berlin, the company works
in the fields of IT, software,
consulting and engineering.
Its success is founded on almost
300 highly qualified employees
who generate annual turnover
of approximately €56 million.
In the past, storage was delivered by HPE
EVA 4400 storage systems. Switches from
Cisco were used in the storage area network.
“The HPE EVA storage systems were very
stable and highly available. However, they
had reached their maximum capacity and
could not be expanded further,” says Volmer.
“Our rapid course of growth meant that
we needed a new, future-proof solution
that would be easy to manage despite
increasing complexity.”
Solution
An end-to-end solution from HPE
Volmer developed a conceptual view
for the future data centre and compared
the technologies oered by various
manufacturers. “Ultimately, we decided
to stay with HPE. Firstly because the HPE
3PAR StoreServ system has a transparent
failover function, which means that if a
system fails, it switches to the other
system automatically and no data is lost.
Secondly, we are very familiar with the
HPE management systems so our
employees did not need to adjust.
Finally, I am convinced that our data
centre is most stable when we have an
end-to-end solution from one manufacturer.”
Tropical Islands therefore decided to replace
the existing Cisco SAN Fabric switches,
which have a data transfer rate of 8 Gbit/s,
with HPE SN SB6000B Fibre Channel
switches with 16 Gbit/s. For the storage
system, they chose two HPE 3PAR StoreServ
7400 with two nodes. In doing so, Tropical
Islands increased the storage capacity in
the SAN to two instances of 70 terabytes.
In the second stage, they selected an IT
systems house certified by HPE that not
only installs the hardware and software
for the new solution, but also guides the
migration of the systems. arxes-tolina
GmbH came out on top “because they
have the expertise and the organisational
requirements that mean experts really
will be available around the clock to
help us in an emergency,” says Volmer.
Benefit
Well prepared for future
company growth
The IT Manager is completely satisfied with
the solution selected, which covers hardware,
services and 24x7 support: “We now have a
truly high-availability, fast and above all
stable SAN infrastructure that we can easily
expand as required. This allows me to take
a more confident view of further company
plans – even if the coming years will see
around 10,000 people on the premises
each day, making it the size of a small town.”
But the construction work is not the only
thing that will make the SAN grow: in the
near future, Tropical Islands is aiming to
oer its guests pay TV via the network.
The company is also considering a data
storage option for its business customers
in the conference hotel. “The multi-client
capability of the HPE 3PAR StoreServ
system oers the perfect conditions
for this,” enthuses Volmer.
Learn more at
hpe.com/justrightit
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notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
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4AA6-4333EEW, April 2016
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