E-Storage breathes new life into Thales Nederland’s infrastructure and storage environment

Thales Nederland is the largest supplier in the Netherlands of the Ministry of Defense. The company produces advanced radar equipment, amongst which the APAR and SMART-L. Besides, Thales Nederland develops flight simulators for the civil market of the Boeing 777 and Airbus 380. The company employs approximately 2,000 people, of which 1,700 at its main office in Hengelo. Under the project name TREIN – Thales Revitalizing Infrastructure – Thales Nederland has been working on the renewal of its IT infrastructure for the past two years. “The storage component was the most complex part of the project. For this we contracted storage expert E-Storage,” said Eric Woonink, IT-manager at Thales.

The IT infrastructure of Thales Nederland is the result of historical developments, just as in many other information-intensive companies. “Two years ago it became clear that there is a lack of cohesion in our infrastructure,” adds Woonink. “We often used stand alone solutions and were increasingly missing an integral approach. At our IT department this created concerns about availability and recovery. A high-tech company like Thales strongly depends on information. Possible infrastructure failures easily disrupt our production and logistic processes and could have severe financial consequences.” For Woonink it became clear that an infrastructure update was necessary. In order to underline this necessity to the Thales management, the company organized an emergency exercise, during which a total disruption of the storage environment was simulated. “The most important lesson we learned was that in such a case data recovery would be very difficult. For us the simulation was enough reason to take on the complete renewal of our datacenter.”

Vision document
Woonink wrote a vision document, containing a broad outline of the required 2010 datacenter. In this outline he integrated every aspect: servers, network and storage. Woonink: “The non-functional requirements of our customers, such as availability and continuity and the technical requirements of our application developers, formed the foundation of this document. One of the conclusions was that we had to shift more towards a dual datacenter architecture.”

TREIN
Woonink drew up a business case based on his vision document. It proved that the renewal plans would not lead to higher operational costs. At the same time, the business case described the possibility to lift both availability and continuity to a higher level. In its proposal, storage integrator E-Storage met the expectations of the Thales storage vision. The findings were enough reason to determine the roadmap with the necessary phases to reach the desired final situation. These practical phases were all part of the TREIN project. The IT department took the lead in the implementation of the new datacenter.

Architecture
Thales completely standardized the new datacenter on Dell server hardware with Windows and Linux Red Hat as operating systems and VMware as virtualization tool. The Thales datacenter in Hengelo is fully redundant, with a mirrored environment in the Thales office in Huizen. Furthermore, a redundant LAN has been implemented. On the basis of calculation of expected growth and business developments Thales has chosen a combined NAS/SAN solution of the IBM N series. “Also costs played an important role in this,” said Eric Woonink. “A NAS solution based on SATA technology is considerably more cost efficient than constructing a SAN with fiber channel technology. About three quarters of our storage is now based on NAS, the rest of the data is disclosed through a SAN.”

NAS or SAN
The NAS appears to seamlessly integrate with the project engineering activities of the company, although this has never been a pre-consideration of Thales. In the engineering world it is important to have information available quickly, but also to share data easily. NAS makes this possible, at a relatively low price. SAN concepts are easier to integrate in a very transaction-intensive environment, like databases.

Foundation
Looking back at two years of TREIN Woonink is satisfied about the foundation that has been laid. “The worries we had two years ago about availability and recovery, no longer exist. Together with E-Storage we have developed an infrastructure that meets all our requirements and made it operational. The next step will be to clearly lay down the processes and guidelines. From an operational point of view we made enormous progress, which certainly led to enthusiasm at our IT department. On this foundation we are able to move on with new developments. There is, for instance, a plan to look into archiving options. For the long term we are also interested in concepts like cloud and grid storage.”

One of the important lessons that Thales has learned from the TREIN project, is that it pays off to work with the right partners for the various project components. Woonink: “What you need are widely oriented parties to develop a vision and an IT architecture that is future-proof. For specific project components it is better to approach specialized parties. We experienced that certain components of an IT infrastructure project, like storage, have become increasingly complex over the past years. We noticed that a specialized party like E-Storage, is able to meet all the expectations in this respect.