Porsche Holding has outsourced its IT services and at the same time established a close relationship with its new service provider. Porsche Informatik GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of Porsche Holding, represents the head and backbone of a complex IT landscape that has the task of controlling the extremely fast growing company without downtimes. Josef Hagler, managing director at Porsche Informatik GmbH, has counted on DRBD to ensure high availability for a company that is developing at full speed.
Thus, Hagler and his team implemented the software CROSSS 2 during operation this year and replaced the previous version. The software was basically developed completely anew; 500,000 code lines were modified, i.e. all components were changed during full operation. Also the base technology was set up anew. The database was changed (from Informix to Oracle), the operating system was switched from AIX 4 to Linux and a 64-bit Intel server was installed instead of the IBM RS6000 server.
Two equal Intel servers were installed that were combined to a cluster using Heartbeat and DRBD. Thanks to DRBD, both machines are synchronous in real time. If a failure occurs on one server, the remaining server takes over the tasks without any loss of data. Since a web and a communication server (including the portal www.weltauto.at) are part of the applications, these also had to be integrated ensuring high availability.
"We opted for DRBD as a cost-efficient open source solution in the field of high-availability clusters. DRBD ideally supports our IT design ensuring easy configuration and quick implementation. In contrast to commercial cluster solutions, we could do without expensive storage hardware for our application servers”, explains Hagler.
