REFERENCE SERVER & STORAGE A secure foundation for all HeidelbergCement locations worldwide. HeidelbergCement is one of the world’s largest building materials companies. After its We were impressed with NetApp’s suite of soft- acquisition of the Italian cement business Italcementi in July 2016, HeidelbergCement has ware right from the very beginning. These tools are become the leading global supplier of cement additives, the world’s second largest sup- extremely easy to use and incredibly reliable. The plier of cement, and the third largest supplier of ready-mixed concrete. Over 63,000 exceptional support by Bechtle’s NetApp specialists employees at more than 3,000 locations in some 60 countries spanning five continents fuel was the cherry on the cake. It has truly been a great its success. HeidelbergCement has relied on NetApp solutions since 2010 for handling its experience working with NetApp. company data, following a core strategy of centralising and virtualising its system struc- ture. Dean Gough Manager, RIS EMEA Application Hosting, Starting point. HeidelbergCement owes the performance and high quality of its products HeidelbergCement AG to the use of state-of-the-art technologies and production processes. Since 2015, the company has doubled down on its efforts to develop technology for the use of CO2 as a raw material, leading the way in the cement industry. The company offers its customers high-quality, tailored solutions for cement, concrete and building materials at market- driven prices. A shared knowledge pool allows the group to quickly turn innovations into enhanced products and manufacturing processes. HeidelbergCement is able to secure considerable long-term financial savings by tightly coordinating the optimisation of its product portfolio, production processes and logistics across its Aggregates, Ready- mixed concrete and Cement business lines. This requires a highly developed IT landscape that can meet the growing storage requirements of the global company and provide future-oriented backup capabilities. The NetApp system environment that Bechtle had introduced in 2010 to replace the previous, time-consuming backup method was now due for an update. Project objectives. HeidelbergCement was looking for a scalable system to manage its data centrally without any additional hardware. The system was also expected to offer a user-friendly, efficient backup solution. Central data management was important so Page 1/2 · Reference HeidelbergCement AG that employees would only have to access one solution, regardless of where in the world CUSTOMER PROFILE they work. Consistent, future-ready virtualisation was chosen as the means to this end. Process. In a previous 2010 project, Bechtle had helped HeidelbergCement resolve sto- rage issues using a NetApp system in purpose-built data centres. The new system vir- HeidelbergCement is one of the world’s largest tualised the storage environment, reducing overall storage requirements thanks to integrated producers of building materials with advanced technologies such as thin provisioning. Six years later, Bechtle brought the leading market positions in aggregates, cement storage environment up to speed with the latest technological advancements, making and ready-mixed concrete. Following the takeo- sure it’s ready to take on the challenges of tomorrow. ver of Italian cement producer Italcementi in July 2016, the group has around 63,000 emplo- Solution. To this end, Bechtle used multiple NetApp ONTAP clusters with FAS8060 con- yees at more than 3,000 locations in some 60 trollers, combined with NetApp’s premium software bundle. These clusters are located countries. in the core data centre – established in 2010 and located in Germany – which is con- HeidelbergCement is known globally for its nected to the data centres in the UK, Texas and Asia. This provides HeidelbergCement expertise and quality. In 2015, the group achie- with a cluster of storage nodes acting as a single unit. In addition, storage capacity and ved revenues of 13.5 billion euros. performance scale easily to accommodate current needs. Bechtle also equipped the HeidelbergCement’s core activities comprise data centre with high-availability solutions for SAP, file services, virtual machines, data- the production and distribution of cement and bases, e-mail and more. This gives any number of users from around the world access aggregates – the two main raw materials for to data at any time without impacting system performance. With respect to the backup concrete. The company supplements its product environment, Bechtle implemented various NearStores for daily snapshot-based range with downstream activities such as ready- backups using SnapVault. These NearStore systems also serve as the basis for weekly mixed concrete, concrete products and ele- tape backups. Bechtle was able to lower storage requirements for both ments, as well as other related products and HeidelbergCement’s MS SQL Server and Oracle databases and the SAP application services. HeidelbergCement also offers servi- through thin provisioning – one of the benefits of virtualisation. To ensure multiple sto- ces such as worldwide delivery of cement and rage locations, data is asynchronously replicated between production and main data clinker by sea. centres (which are located between 40 and 100 km apart) via SnapMirror. As a result, For more information, please visit: data is always kept up to date without incurring excessive costs. www.heidelbergcement.com Business benefits. The chosen NetApp products enabled Bechtle to significantly improve RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and other service para- meters, dramatically reducing the time from when a system goes down to when data is OUR PARTNER: once again available. While the service level agreement (SLA) used to guarantee 72 hours, HeidelbergCement can now restore its business processes within just four hours. Asynchronous replication has cut the period between two backups from four hours to 30 minutes, which also lowers the associated tolerable data loss. Data deduplication and thin provisioning now provides up to 80% more available storage capacity, eliminating the need to expand storage in the near future and thereby lowering IT costs. In the end, HeidelbergCement received centralised access to all data with an efficient backup solution at work in the background – guaranteeing that data is available at all times to HeidelbergCement locations around the globe. Visit www.bechtle.com Page 2/2 · Reference HeidelbergCement AG to find out more..