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DFDS means transport. Transport with a capital “T.” The company’s
fleet of 20 ships ply the major sea routes and their 4,700
lorries, emblazoned with “DFDS” on the tarpaulins, are famous
throughout Europe. It’s an old firm where long traditions
and old-fashioned values guarantee goods will reach their
destination on time. But it’s also a firm at the forefront
of new developments and adapts readily to changing markets
and techniques – by making it possible, for example, for customers
to follow the progress of their consignments via the Internet.
Seeking a fault-tolerant disk system
A modern transport firm is so dependent on IT that most of its
IT functions are regarded as mission-critical. DFDS Dan Transport,
one of the largest transport firms in northern Europe, has been
a faithful user of HP e3000
for many years, and has used the system to administer its finances
and the international transport controlling system, known as
CargoLink.
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DFDS
at a glance
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In 1866, a few small Danish shipping firms merged to
form a new entity called DFDS. Today DFDS Dan Transport
is one of the leading Northern European transport companies,
and controls the entire chain of transport through land,
sea, and air based transport and logistics solutions.
DFDS has a strong market position in the Nordic countries,
the UK, Ireland, France, Holland, Belgium, the Baltic
States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Far
East and USA. The company has an annual turnover of
approx. Euro (€) 2 billion and employs some 8,500 staff.
DFDS Dan Transport is a subsidiary of DFDS.
The DFDS concern, with more than
12,000 employees and an annual turnover of just under
Euro (€) 3 billion, is among the largest industrial
companies in Denmark.
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While extremely satisfied with the performance and reliability
of HP systems, IT Manager
Nils Holm was plagued by one large problem: if a disk went
down, it could mean the server would be out of action for
as much as five or six hours. Now, you may think this problem
could be solved using RAID technology, but DFDS didn’t feel
the response times were satisfactory and spent several years
seeking a solution.
The solution to DFDS’s problem finally emerged in the summer
of 1999, when
HP and
Hitachi’s collaboration in disk technology resulted in the
launch of the HP Surestore
E Disk Array XP256. The
HP
Surestore E Disk Array was exactly the fault-tolerant disk
solution DFDS had been seeking and
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Implementing the solution
DFDS had just taken over Dan Transport A/S in the spring of
1999, and the number of users of the IT systems was suddenly
about to leap from 1,800 to more than 3,000. As the firm enjoys
rapid growth anyway, it was decided to use the opportunity to
reconfigure the common systems to cope with more than 5,000
users – thus allowing for future expansion.
The original two servers have now been expanded to four.
The largest markets each have their own server, while the
smaller ones are slotted in where there is room, ensuring
a balanced load on the systems. As DFDS’s transport systems
span many countries, data is being continually transferred
between the servers all day long. On top of this, two more
HP e3000 servers are now being used
to run the finance system.
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Making doubly sure
Before the upgrade, DFDS made sure in advance that they could
keep the original disks for three months – to be used as extra
backup if problems should arise. When the HP
Surestore E Disk Array XP256 system began operating, they
began by carefully transferring data from a single system.
This went well, and the response times were convincing.
The critical question was, what would happen when the next
server was brought online? Then it would no longer be a matter
of users just retrieving data from the disk system – with
server number two online, the whole concept would really be
tested. Would the internal exchange of data between servers
place such a load on the system that the effect on response
time would be obvious to users? But here, too, everything
worked according to plan … and since then, everything has
run smoothly.
The combination of a daily tape backup, the preservation
of the entire original disk system, and a systematic change-over,
meant allowances were made for all possible difficulties.
Today, the system has a net capacity
of about 800 GB. At first, extremely fast 12,000 rpm 15 GB
disks were used, but more sedate (7,200 rpm) 36 GB disks have
since proved to have entirely satisfactory response times, and
are used for system upgrades.
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