Austria | Manufacturing

Knauf GmbH

Infrastructure Harmonization

Founded in 1970, Knauf GmbH Österreich, a limited corporation, was established in Weißenbach near Liezen and is part of the "Knauf Gips KG" Group of companies. Knauf produces construction systems, which offer successful ideal solutions that simplify, as well as save time with, the planning and building of diverse projects. At present, the Knauf Group Austria maintains 13 production facilities in 16 central European countries with approximately 1,350 employees.
http://www.knauf.at/

The challenge

Knauf Gmbh Österreich’s top priority was to have IT at the sites spread throughout Europe, running as efficiently as possible. In addition, for security reasons, the data and backup systems were to be held and administered centrally, in order to reduce the costs for decentralized administration and to optimize the quality of data security. A considerable expansion of the bandwidths was to be avoided because of the high ongoing costs that would arise as a result. Centralization of the server area by maintaining the bandwidths sounds as impossible as making the circle square, but in fact it is not.

The project

Together with the client, S&T Austria developed a ‘serverless affiliates’ design, based on the ultra-modern Riverbed technology. No local servers need to be installed on-the-spot at the different locations, sales offices and branches. Riverbed WAN Accelerators serve as highly intelligent buffer memory (caches) and deposit data in the decentralized locations at the client’s disposal, with very short response times.

The WAN Accelerator itself will be administrated from a remote location. With minimal configuration, the piece of equipment (actually a ‘black box’) is sent to the remote location where it is simply connected to the outward link (using a router) and then connected to the electricity supply. After that, all further adjustments, as well as function control and monitoring can be completed by the administrator, centrally. Within the parameters of the project, the Riverbed Steelhead 1020 system was implemented in the central location in Weißenbach and the Riverbed Steelhead 200 system was implemented
in Graz, Linz and Vienna, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Montenegro. Data and application servers can be centrally installed, administered and protected in this way.

Benefit for the customer

  • No on-the-spot IT know-how for server maintenance and back-up system required
  • Cost savings
  • Data is installed centrally; hence, increased data security and higher availability
  • Optimal use of existing WAN bandwidths
  • Optimal network response times