RLE International

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For a company like RLE International, mobility, flexibility, and superior technology are key to meeting the demands of its customers. Headquartered in Köln, Germany, RLE International is a leading engineering service supplier to the worldwide automotive industry, providing innovative designs for the development of vehicle body structures, drive concepts, and electronics.

Since RLE began in 1985, it has grown to global proportions with 1,200 employees and operation centers throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. While growth created more business opportunities for the company, it also posed serious challenges for RLE’s worldwide datacenter in Köln, which is operated by casolute GmbH, a German IT services provider.

“At times, we had to keep more than 30 different production servers running," says Michael Manten, senior manager of product sales at casolute. Increased system failures, a shortage of storage capacity and space, and high administrative expenses led RLE and casolute to seek a new solution.

Casolute consolidated RLE's heterogeneous landscape with a virtualization solution based on two powerful Sun x86 servers with AMD processors and running VMware ESX. Casolute also deployed Sun Ray 1 Ultra Thin Clients, a 30-slot Sun StorageTek SL500 Modular Library System with two StorageTek LTO3 SCSI tape drives, and a Sun StorageTek 6140 SAN.

The new solution provides RLE with faster processing speeds and makes it possible for casolute to virtualize I/O-burdening applications. casolute is able to run 24 virtual servers on the two clustered Sun x86 servers for RLE’s core applications and operating systems—plus a number of third-party applications—and largely automate the storage and archiving of data.

The virtualization solution has reduced RLE’s hardware expenditures and IT administration costs by 30 percent each, and is helping the company respond faster to customer needs and changes in the market. Now, an administrator can immediately set up a new virtual server for customer presentation scenarios or for test purposes – and quickly turn it off again when it is no longer needed. With less hardware, RLE has reduced power consumption by 70 percent and, with the savings in hardware expenditures and in administration and energy costs, it has achieved full ROI in just 18 months.

More importantly, with the Sun StorageTek 6140 SAN and SL500 modular library system, RLE has been able to mitigate business risks associated with downtime or data corruption, such as not being able to meet specified delivery times. Sun prevailed over the competition with its a proven, high-speed, high-reliability solution for data protection. Manten says, "Sun proved itself not merely through technologies, but also through good maintenance contracts and service structures. In addition, Sun’s expert knowledge concerning VMware, which eased our introduction to the product, was also persuasive."

RLE and casolute are currently testing whether the benefits of the Sun solution can also be extended to the desktop with the Sun Ray thin clients. "Overall we are well positioned for all economic challenges with the virtualization solution on Sun hardware," Michael Häfele, IT manager at RLE, concludes.