Since its establishment in 2002, imes-icore GmbH has evolved from a specialist in custom CNC machine systems to one of the global leaders in digital dental CAD/CAM production systems. In this capacity, it offers the world’s largest portfolio of milling and grinding machines, covering all dental market segments such as dentists, clinics, laboratories, and milling centers.
The Challenge
Facing increasing demands for availability and performance as well as growing storage needs, imes-icore sought a suitable storage solution and a high-performance foundation for operating its existing ERP system “proalpha”. Attention was also needed for spatial separation of systems and the avoidance of waste through unused standby resources.
The Solution
euroNAS eEVOS
With euroNAS eEVOS, a reliable foundation was found that keeps pace with the requirements for stability and performance, as well as the growing number of users and increasing storage demands.
Solutions from VMware and Microsoft were also considered. A particular challenge was finding a high-performance PCIe – NVMe based all-flash solution that offered redundancy of the flash drives (at least RAID 1) without interface losses. After extensive performance and stability tests, a switch was made to Euronas’s KVM-based virtualization solution in the spring of 2022. To mitigate potential replication losses in this active-active solution, redundant 40Gbit replication is used.
In the meantime, another euroNAS eEVOS-based solution for secondary systems with large storage needs has been deployed.
euroNAS HA-Cluster
The euroNAS HA-Cluster based on iSCSI was discovered as a solution that, on one hand, provides access to standard hardware components without potential locking effects and restrictions, and on the other, remains within the given budget. The euroNAS HA-Cluster is employed as a central storage system for a VMware-based virtualization solution. The cluster environment, which tolerates the failure of an entire cluster node, offers a capacity of 40TB and houses approximately 45 virtual systems.
Conclusion
Not least, the competent consulting and support in the implementation of the solutions, as well as the consistently expert service for questions regarding optimizations and upgrades, have convinced us of euroNAS’s performance capabilities.