Figeac Aero manages growth with DataCore software-defined storage

French aero parts maker Figeac chose software-defined hyper-converged infrastructure from DataCore as a way of simplifying its storage systems during a period of recent strong growth.

The group had expanded rapidly by acquisition and went from 450 employees in 2006 to 3,600 now, and has 14 sites across the globe.

“We have made lots of acquisitions in recent years so we had to define an IT model for our subsidiaries that simplified deployment and use,” says Simon Auroy, group head of networks and support at Figeac Aero.

“In every factory with 60 or more employees we use DNC servers to run machining stations to manufacture parts. That is in addition to database servers, administrative applications, file servers dedicated to CAD. And then you have servers for Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, printing,” he adds.

Figeac Aero’s datacentres are pretty conventional, with servers, core network and SAN storage, each administered from its own environment. But, four years ago Auroy started to look at the possibility of doing away with the need to administer the SAN, which had weighed heavily on the IT teams of the company’s subsidiaries.

“Because the board had decided that the operation of our ERP application would be kept at our HQ, and that this necessitated construction of a second server room, the idea of augmenting our resilience was born. Two sites in active-active mode would allow us to assure continuity in case of an incident,” says Auroy.

And, to achieve that, the simplest solution looked like virtualisation of the company’s storage estate. “The idea of software-defined storage is to pull together the disk capacity from our two server rooms into a single logical pool, on which we can create volumes independent of their physical location and these can be replicated from one to the other. This way, if one of the two rooms goes down we can be assured that everything is operational in the other room,” says Auroy.

On the hardware side, in each server room Auroy’s team deployed three Huawei Fusion servers, a CloudFabric network core plus an OceanStor iSCSI 10Gbps disk array.

The servers are virtualised with VMware ESXi and the two rooms connected by double fibre optic. The disk arrays lack advanced functionality apart from creating snapshots of their contents.

Auroy knew that software-defined storage was needed to create the global storage pool and replication between the two arrays. The task was to find the best product for the job. VMware has its vSAN and that looked an obvious solution, but the integrator most closely working with Figeac advised Auroy to take a look at SANsymphony from DataCore.