Customer Story - WMF

The Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik Aktiengesellschaft (WMF AG) is a renowned manufacturer of house and hotel ware. WMF’s expertise in the design and production of top quality kitchen and table products for the private and the commercial sectors earns the brand name WMF wide recognition. Founded in 1853, at the time it ran under the name „Metallwarenfabrik Straub & Schweizer“. Twenty seven years later, the company merged with “Metallwarenfabrik A. Ritter & Co.” to become “Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik, Inc.” Today, in the factory in Geislingen alone, WMF has over 2200 employees.  WMF is represented by 183 of its own specialized outlets as well as numerous subsidiaries world wide.

 

Within a graphic department of its own, high resolution pictures are taken of all the WMF products. After being revised and retouched, the pictures are ultimately digitally stored. To ensure the optimal security of this valuable data, all the servers and workstations need to be backed up. For this purpose, WMF employs an Xserver with an Xraid and an Overland tape library running under Mr. Bernd Horlacher’s supervision. For years, the backup tasks were preformed using the Retrospect backup software. After migrating to the  Mac OS X platform and to the Overland library, WMF discovered that their current software was not quite up to the task of allowing high data throughput and handling the ever growing data volume. “Retrospect was not able to meet either of these requirements,” Mr. Horlacher says. A new solution was necessary to alleviate this situation so WMF decided to employ BRU. BRU, however, has one big drawback; it has no GUI and is therefore not very user-friendly. Additionally, according to Mr. Horlacher, BRU offers only a limited variety of functionalities. Eventually, BRU’s deficiencies proved too limiting in solving WMF’s problem.

 

With an extended requirements catalogue, WMF set out to find not only a high-performance, but  and at the some time also a user-friendly software solution. The system house Bissinger recommended PresSTORE. After Mr. Horlacher downloaded the trial version from ARCHIWARE’s website and installed it, he was immediately able to start the first backup jobs. “I was really impressed of the support that I got, even for the trial version”, says Mr. Horlacher who appreciates the professional technical support and the opportunity to directly inquire with the ARCHIWARE team about how to  realize complex backup strategies with PresSTORE. Even with the trial version Mr. Horlacher was able to seamlessly integrate PresSTORE into the present production processes and to extensively test the software. PresSTORE met all his expectations, which eventually led to the decision for WMF to employ PresSTORE in backing up its production data.

 

To ensure an optimal security, WMF synchronizes data to a 5TB Xraid four times a day. The backed up data is thus immediately available, if required. In addition, an incremental backup runs every business day backing up approximately 30GB of modified or newly created layout, image and print data to LTO2 tapes. The full backup is run at the beginning of each month and additionally once a week. At least one set of tapes containing a full backup is always stored off-site in a remote safe. This allows for data recovery even after fire or water catastrophes. The PresSTORE Archive module is used to daily archive high resolution HDR data and to reduce the load off the production systems. 

 

 

Since the implementation of the software a couple of months ago, PresSTORE became an indispensable tool for the graphic department. The ability  to synchronize, backup and archive data with a single software solution additionally convinced WMF of PresSTORE.

 

 

“ARCHIWARE’s PresSTORE is a perfect integrated data management solution. It ensures us a maximum of data security with a minimum of effort,” is how Mr. Horlacher describes his experiences with PresSTORE.