Proactive Management of Schaeffler’s Storage Performance with IntelliMagic Vision

Schaeffler develops and manufactures precision products for everything that moves – in machines, equipment, and vehicles as well as in aviation and aerospace applications – with its INA, LuK, and FAG brands. The company is well known for the highest precision and the best quality.

For their centralized monitoring of Storage Performance and SLAs, Schaeffler decided to use IntelliMagic Vision for Open Systems as the main performance monitoring and early warning system for over fifty storage systems at more than twenty locations, distributed across three continents.

“In order to meet the high demands for agility and performance,” says Thomas Ehmke, the Server & Storage Systems team leader at Schaeffler, “we use storage systems from various manufacturers, and configure them according to the different requirements.”

Virtualization plays an ever growing role, which makes storage administration easier, but at the same time increases the complexity of the system landscape. Ehmke stresses that “systems management must, however, remain as simple as possible.”

More and more systems that are important to the business are moved under the central virtualization layer, with the aim of concentrating I/O delivery on as little hardware as possible through virtualization. “Proactive monitoring of performance and of any bottlenecks that may arise is therefore indispensable,” Ehmke explains, “in order to meet growing performance demands (throughput, response times).”

Ehmke points out that “easy administration and central monitoring of the storage system environment at Schaeffler are extremely important”, and explains that “IntelliMagic Vision enables us to gain a hardware vendor independent overview of all storage systems used worldwide by Schaeffler and is therefore an efficient method to check SLA compliance and to prevent any potential problems from developing further.”

IntelliMagic Vision offers options to create and distribute early warning dashboards ‘out of the box’, and can be used to perform trend analyses and to investigate unexpected performance values through specific drilldowns. This also allows for quick and easy assessment of the effectiveness of specific actions and new hardware.

“Efficient and reliable tools are a must-have for storage administration at Schaeffler, in order to manage the fast growing, worldwide requirements for storage economically”, says Ehmke, adding that “flexible and reliable partners are an important element here, as well as the continual development and adaption of the tools to meet future challenges.”

Thomas Ehmke summarizes that “in conclusion, we have seen that IntelliMagic Vision makes a valuable contribution to compliance with the agreed SLAs. Its volume based licence model has been adapted to the current business situation within the Schaeffler group and has been fixed for several years; thereby enabling a reliable forecast of the costs for this time period.”

About Schaeffler

The Schaeffler Group, with its headquarters in Herzogenaurach in Germany, is active in the automotive and manufacturing industries with its three strong brands INA, FAG and LuK. With over 76,000 employees worldwide at 180 locations in over 50 countries, Schaeffler is one of the largest German and European industrial companies in family ownership. www.schaeffler.de