Overview
Lufthansa Systems has been planning and operating its data storage on a strategic basis with one of the most modern computer systems in Europe for years. Since the beginning of 2002, Lufthansa Systems has successfully installed two StorageTek. VSMs during its restructuring from a classic storage system to the technically and economically future-oriented virtual storage technology.

The situation
By the end of 1999, the IT managers at Lufthansa Systems were certain that changing the storage system was the only possible and economically efficient way to manage its continuous and long-term data growth. In the course of the year, an enormous volume of data had been collected on a total of 45,000 data cassettes (tapes). The tapes were stored in seven StorageTek PowderHorn tape libraries, or on shelves. Lufthansa Systems was faced with the challenge - which nearly all users of classic tape technologies discover sooner or later - of optimizing their existing storage resources.

Consolidation of Resources
StorageTek developed a virtual storage concept incorporating two of the existing StorageTek PowderHorn libraries, outfitting each library with seven of the world's fastest, high-capacity StorageTek T9840B tape drives. With the new tape drives, the capacity per tape was increased from 800 megabytes to 20 gigabytes (uncompressed) and the average data access time was significantly reduced.

The virtualization took place with two StorageTek VSM systems, each with a storage capacity of 1.1 terabytes. The use of the VSM solution resulted in a considerable advantage as compared with conventional tape technologies. The existing storage capacity of the tapes now can be used up to 100 percent. In practice, the tapes in this case are made completely - and transparently - virtual for the respective operating system in the disk cache of the VSM. Only then are the physical tapes written with the use of the maximum storage capacity.

Economic advance through virtual
"With the new virtual StorageTek storage solution, not only is the management of the data growth for the coming years assured, but also the customers of Lufthansa Systems have considerable advantages. For example, Jobs, which accesses data sets in the storage system, operates markedly faster today than before. The performance of the research center was altogether increased, and the reactions of our customers were thoroughly positive," said Curt Borschel, storage management manager, Lufthansa Systems.