Lekkerland GmbH & Co. KG

Story Details

In twelve countries across Europe, Lekkerland GmbH & Co, KG supplies some 131,000 forecourt shops, kiosks, tobacconists' shops, drinks outlets, department stores, food markets, fast food chains, bakers, canteens and convenience stores with a full range of tobacco goods and confectionery, drinks, snacks, fast food, fresh produce, non-food items and telephone cards.

The backup system installed in Lekkerland’s data center was struggling to keep up with the growing volumes of data. The SAP retail system alone, which originally supported 1.5 terabytes of data, was now handling over four terabytes a day. As a result, it was taking between 15 and 16 hours to complete backups originally planned to be done overnight during non-working hours. In addition to the slow throughput of existing systems, read and write errors were becoming increasingly common.

Lekkerland chose to replace its existing system with a clustered virtual tape library (VTL) solution based on Sun StorageTek products and FalconStor VTL software. Two Sun StorageTek FlexLine FLX380 disk systems act as a buffer for the virtual tape solution. A Sun StorageTek SL500 library with four LTO3 drives takes care of long-term archiving and additional backups for mission-critical systems on remote media. The systems' redundant design allows for rapid failover should one of the VTL systems fail.

Lekkerland’s procurement costs for the virtual tape library solution were only slightly more expensive than the classic alternative. Support costs, on the other hand, are much lower, due in part to the elimination of the high rate of wear experienced by tape drives. Thanks to the automatic mail home function built into the new solution, Lekkerland’s experts are notified automatically in the event of a problem. Added to this was the fact that the software provider chosen for this project, FalconStor, has been collaborating closely with Sun for some time now and has considerable experience in the development of storage virtualization solutions for the optimization of backup processes and storage networks.

This partnership-style approach quickly paid off in the project. Sun implemented not only the hardware, but also took over the role of general contractor. Two staff from FalconStor installed the VTL appliance and configured the backup environment. Two specialists from Lekkerland coordinated the work on the customer’s side in relation to the configuration of the operating system and backup software in accordance with the company’s own requirements.

Thanks to compression technology, Lekkerland was able to shrink the retail system’s 4.2 terabyte database to around 950 gigabytes. The VTL solution facilitates a data throughput, compressed, of 400 megabytes per second. This enables Lekkerland to make the necessary backups of its retail system in a time window of just six hours. All other backup procedures have also been dramatically accelerated. Instead of taking 20 to 30 minutes to run, smaller applications are now backed up in two to three minutes. This means that day-to-day operations are no longer interrupted, even as the volume of data increases. The new VTL system can also be expanded beyond the already-installed 53 terabytes of capacity, allowing it to be scaled easily to support growing volumes of data.