30.08.2007 | Austria
S&T Austria centralises and secures server for Knauf
Innovative concept with Riverbed Technology saves money
For Knauf Austria, producer of building systems for dry mortarless construction, S&T Austria centralised the server region from five countries. Based on state of the art Riverbed Technology the servers in the subsidiaries became redundant („serverless affiliates“ concept). As a result the costs for server administration could be reduced significantly and at the same time the quality of data security increased.
Knauf Ltd. Austria in Weißenbach near Liezen belongs to the multinational Knauf Group and produces building systems for dry mortarless construction. The Knauf Group in Eastern Europe maintains 16 production plants and employs approximately 1900 employees in 20 Central European countries. The Austrian organisation oversees and administrates the IT systems at the main location in Weißenbach, the sales offices in Vienna and Linz as well as the subsidiaries in Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Montenegro. „We wanted to centralise the server environment to reduce the high costs for the decentralised administration while at the same time optimising the quality of data security. The usual speed and performance capacity of the systems was supposed to remain the same but without an increase in the band widths of the connections of our countries, to prevent a mere cost shifting. The innovative concept from S&T Austria convinced us“, explains Engineer Armin Schreiegg from the management of the data processing team at Knauf Ltd. Austria.
Top performance without servers
The concept of „serverless affiliates“ developed by S&T Austria together with experts from Knauf reduces the number of local servers required in the subsidiaries without having to increase network band widths. The data access of local employees to server based applications ensues as quickly as usual however, due to the fact that the Riverbed-WAN accelerators employed serve as highly intelligent cache and make data available in the decentralised locations with very short waiting times. Implementation of settings, monitoring and maintenance of the system is carried out remotely by the headquarters in Weißenbach. Georg Komornyik, CEO of S&T Austria commented: „A reduction of servers in the branch offices always used to mean an increase in the network band widths and slower access times. In this project we are showing that there are new technological possibilities that enable both cost reductions and increased quality at the same time.“
