I wrote and published the following case study which originally appeared as one of Microchip’s web-based Customer Stories during the time I served as Technology Marketing Advisor for the company.
A Legacy of Innovation
As a leading German IT innovator for nearly three decades, Wortmann operates like a family. It is a family business after all; founded in 1986 by Siegbert Wortmann, who serves as chairman of the board. From its headquarters in Hüllhorst, North Rhine-Westphalia the Wortman family tree branches out from its 650 employees to include over 15,000 specialized resellers and IT providers throughout Europe. The company prides itself on being a single source in many of the key categories for IT hardware and cloud services that power the modern enterprise. Wortmann serves its information technology customers as a distributor of leading software, peripheral hardware devices and components via the high-availability distribution network and support programs for which it is known. Wortmann is also a leading distributor of Microsoft licenses throughout the region.
The company’s TERRA brand is nearly as old as the company itself, with the first TERRA-branded products rolling out in 1988. The brand is synonymous with the company’s reputation for quality, support and a made-in-Germany heritage. TERRA also stands for security to many of the company’s customers who are pleased to see that their sensitive data is housed in-country.
TERRA-branded PCs, workstations, notebook computers, LCD monitors, tablets, servers, storage devices, and thin clients have a well-established presence in Germany and are expanding into adjacent European markets aided by its family of service partners and supported by its network of service centers.
Cloud Expansion
As the Wortmann moved into the data center and cloud infrastructure sectors, the TERRA name evolved along with it.
Today, the TERRA CLOUD data center offering enables customers to locate their services within the TERRA data center in Hüllhorst, taking full advantage of the company’s highly-available infrastructure and security. TERRA CLOUD servers offer customers the benefits of a private cloud infrastructure on the operating systems of their choice. TERRA CLOUD VM is the virtual machine solution that delivers a virtualized IT framework including use servers, storage and networking elements that ensure a complete Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) package.
TERRA CLOUD Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings bring private (external) Microsoft Exchange Server capabilities to the market, along with a variety of hybrid architecture plans to enable flexibility for TERRA customers.
TERRA CLOUD Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a holistic offering that manages the complete IT infrastructure for an enterprise software solution. This delivers an incredible amount of scalability for TERRA customers, with related cost, maintenance and security benefits.
TERRA CLOUD storage allows customers to leverage the value and enterprise-class functionality of TERRA high-availability storage clusters for their storage-on-demand requirements. TERRA Storage solutions are architected using the latest technology to support a customer’s need for capacity, performance and reliability. High-performance all-flash SSDs (solid state drives) are also incumbent within the TERRA Storage infrastructure.
At the Center: The TERRA CLOUD
As you might imagine, the data center that supports all these hosting, housing, IaaS and SaaS services is a signature element that not only powers the infrastructure, but allows TERRA-based solutions to stand apart from competitive offerings in Germany and beyond. The TERRA CLOUD facility was architected with 10GE connectivity to the internet backbone, high-speed access to outbound Internet connections, UPS-secured redundant power supply and diesel backup generators, an air-conditioned server room with hot aisle containment, 24-hour video surveillance, dual authentication access control, and two independent data center areas.
And then there’s Wortmann’s green and clean energy story. It’s remarkable. Large data centers are often accused of overheating their environments. Some suggest that they consume more than 2% of the world’s electricity.
Wortmann’s data center shows what is possible. At the main Hüllhorst campus, the rooftops of both the Wortmann AG headquarters building and the TERRA CLOUD Center feature large-scale solar panels which collectively generate a significant amount of the electricity required to power the TERRA CLOUD. An elaborate control system leverages outdoor air to perform near energy-free cooling for much of the year, with a hybrid solution kicking in for the warmer months. The highest average temperatures in Hüllhorst range from 23°C (73°F) in July to 3°C (37°F) in January.
As the Wortmann team began to address the cloud hosting opportunity, it recognized that the company would need to evolve from a regional systems vendor to cloud services provider capable of supporting customers on a global scale. It would also require scalable storage hardware with high performance attributes, high reliability characteristics and real-time management capabilities.
A Meeting of the Minds
When developing plans for the TERRA CLOUD data center, Wortmann carefully chose products with real-world driven performance and efficient manageability. They also hand-picked a well-established team that could bring their data center infrastructure from concept to launch and continue to support it over the lifetime of the data center.
Our product engagements with Wortmann date back nearly 20 years and have resulted in their exclusive adoption of several generations of our leading-edge RAID adapters. As a trusted supplier with proven expertise and support capabilities, the Adaptec team was essential in the buildout of Wortmann’s TERRA CLOUD Data Center and was involved from the very beginning.
The Adaptec team was chosen for its deep understanding of evolving storage requirements, the ability to align expectations with market realities, and proven expertise to facilitate the testing and evaluation of industry-leading storage solutions. As planning commenced, Wortmann engineers were able to leverage our experience in the design and validation of scalable storage architectures. Testing occurred in the German Interoperability Lab and in real-world data center environments.
Among the cornerstone solutions that the team endorsed during the planning phases were the Adaptec Smart RAID Adapters and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).
Adaptec SmartRAID RAID Adapters
Our Adaptec SmartRAID adapters are full-featured, high-performance enterprise hardware RAID adapters built for a variety of storage requirements. They have the industry’s lowest power consumption and provide maximum read/write bandwidth and Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) when coupled with 12 Gbps SSDs. Unique features available on some adapters include integrated Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection (ZMCP); maxCache, a SSD caching; and maxCrypto controller-based encryption for any block-based storage device.
Adaptec Host Bus Adapters
Our Adaptec Host Bus Adapters are the ideal connectivity solution for server-based storage systems that require maximum bandwidth and I/O connectivity, low power consumption and high reliability. With the highest port count available, our HBAs deliver the lowest latency and highest performance when connected to SSDs. Without the need for expanders (in most rack server applications), our design approach delivers a cost-efficient path for those requiring the highest levels of storage performance and scalability in next-generation data centers.
In addition, Adaptec SAS HD cables were selected for the project as they are configured with mini-SAS HD connectors to allow for maximum performance and connectivity in an MD2 low-profile form factor, without ever having to worry about compatibility.
Approaching Wortmann’s 30th anniversary, the TERRA CLOUD serves as the centerpiece of the company’s expanding presence in the cloud data center sector, and we are proud to have contributed their expertise as a single-source provider of hardware RAID solutions to such an ambitious project. The ongoing relationship includes collaboration for future product development and feature upgrades, advanced configurations and firmware changes.
Our solutions deliver maximum reliability and best-in-class performance that all RAID levels come to expect, plus unique features like Mixed Mode support (RAID and HBA devices can be used simultaneously), adapter power management (reduces power consumption up to 30 percent), and Advanced Data Management (ADM) that allow data migration from existing RAID arrays to new ones when upgrading old hard disks or worn-out SSDs.
Microchip is a trusted supplier of Adaptec SmartRAID and HBA adapters, as well as storage expertise. For more than 20 years, we have relied on Adaptec products for performance, reliability and management capabilities to match our vision for the data center of today, and tomorrow.
— Martin Klein, Director Datacenter & Cloud Services, Wortmann AG
The unprecedented management and maintenance capabilities of the Adaptec storage solutions that were introduced into the Wortmann solution leverage many of the key components of the Microchip Smart Storage stack.
World Class Design and Support: With well-established Adaptec products and innovative support, the TERRA data center storage infrastructure history has been performing at peak levels from concept to launch, and beyond.
Real-world Performance: Adaptec RAID and HBA products operate with outstanding real-world application performance.
Manageability: The Adaptec solution set delivers efficient maintenance possibilities to TERRA CLOUD storage systems.
Real-time Monitoring: Adaptec’s solution delivers an unprecedented combination of remote management, email notification, event notification, SMNP support using the ARCCONF Command Line Utility (CLI) and Adaptec maxView Storage Manager (GUI).
The best products and the best team. Proven design, support and performance. Manageability and real-time monitoring. Mission critical technology elements and collaborative teams all came together in a state-or-the-art data center buildout that can scale to meet the demands of Wortmann customers today and tomorrow.
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