The Warsteiner Brewery is one of the largest privately held breweries in Germany and sells its products in more than 50 countries worldwide. For a modern brewery like this, high availability processes are essential to ensure uninterrupted beverage production. To map its business processes, the family business operated an IT infrastructure with a storage solution that was more than six years old, which not only caused high support costs, but also reached its limits in terms of performance and space requirements. “Our old systems were still equipped with rotating spindles. We wanted to replace them with the latest all-flash technology to be up-to-date,” explains Andre Ifland, system manager at Warsteiner.

The new storage solution should ensure highly available processes at two locations three kilometers apart. A further complication was that both sites are still connected via an old pipeline, which Warsteiner still uses and uses to connect the data centers of the two sites via fiber.

The challenge for Andre Ifland was therefore to find a storage system that could handle the limited capacity of this cable solution: it had only a limited number of wires for data transport, while most systems require more fiber optic wires. A technical solution to compensate for this bottleneck was ruled out, as this would not only entail additional costs, but also potentially new sources of error.

Market research soon revealed that only Fujitsu’s storage solution could meet the high demands of the brewery, even with the existing number of lines. Ifland has therefore invested in two high-performance Fujitsu Storage ETERNUS AF250 systems connected via Fiber Channel, forming a storage cluster across both Warsteiner sites.