Upgrade for LINUS WITTICH Medien KG with CEPH and Proxmox

Starline develops a cluster concept for one of the leading publishing houses in Germany

An aging VMware system at LINUS WITTICH Medien KG - a large publishing house with 1,000 employees and 13 locations - needed to be updated to ensure high availability. The system administrators were tasked with searching for suitable providers.

However, high-availability clusters with the corresponding know-how and the necessary technical support are only available from a handful of suppliers in Germany. It was therefore necessary to make the ideal selection.

As Zealbox servers from Starline were still running in the laboratory at LINUS WITTICH Medien KG and the old contact had never been completely broken off, the system administrators approached Bernd Widmaier. Thanks to his precise analysis, the agile sales manager was able to distil the publisher's needs into an offer - a solution that ultimately outperformed even the major competitors:

Fast and scalable Proxmox cluster with 10 nodes
Distributed file system CEPH
Comprehensive hardware support from Starline itself
Cluster support via Starline by manufacturer Proxmox

„As an admin, I just want to unpack a package, connect it and switch it on. Starline sent us a fully installed and preconfigured system that was ready to use straight away. That's how it should be.”

System administrator Michael Grundmann, LINUS WITTICH Medien KG

The publisher also needed a fast file server - including a GRAID card for the redundancy calculations of the installed NVMe SSDs. Bernd Widmaier quickly created a suitable concept for this too.

GRAID Controller SR-1010 im NVMe ASUS-Chassis

Starline was ultimately awarded the contract due to its good advice, fast response, good price and, above all, first-class support.

„Many thanks for the good support - I am glad that we ended up with Starline and not with the manufacturer we had originally considered.”

System administrator Michael Grundmann, LINUS WITTICH Medien KG

Result

The cluster is now in regular operation - including a Proxmox backup server and cyclical LTO backups. Thanks to incremental backups, all locations are backed up quickly and chronologically, while the modern CEPH file system ensures continuous data consistency.

Service advantages

Benefit from the storage veterans

Highly Experienced

Starline has been active in the sector since 1982 and is a specialist in all aspects of data storage.

Self-critical work

We regularly review our work and internal processes and are eager to improve where things go wrong.

Innovative products

Our product managers and technicians are constantly searching for sophisticated server and storage products.

Full Service

On-site service or on-site installation can be booked - on request also within four hours (24 x 7 x 4).

Our systems at a glance

You can find our Zealbox servers here

The core competence of LINUS WITTICH Medien KG is local information in cooperation with local authorities. They are active across Germany in 11 federal states, with 13 publishing locations, 3 newspaper printing plants and 1 commercial printing plant as well as in Austria with over 1000 employees - and have been for 50 years.

Long-term cooperation documented

Solution for Wittich Medien replaces 20 servers

With highly available storage and also tiering of VMs over SSDs and hard disks to a modern VMware solution for publishing house.

Any questions? Please contact us.

Andreas Freisen

Sales

Project Manager from the Enterprise Storage Solutions Team - our specialists for large projects.