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Server Farm

Described below are the technical properties of Unimatica's Server Farm designed for services in outsourcing and ASP modes. This solution takes account of the optimal performance required by services provided, also guaranteeing high levels of scalability together with the system's extreme flexibility.

Unimatica's Server-Farm is based on the following technologies:

  1. Server Virtualization (VMWare)
  2. Storage Area Network (SAN)
  3. Primary Data Center and secondary Data Centers distributed regionally
  4. Efficient and automatic backup systems, database replication and disaster recovery

Unimatica S.p.A. is structured on four data center, the two primary data center are located at Bologna and Settimo Torinese and the two secondary data center are located at Florence (Disaster Recovery) and Cosenza (backup).


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Primary Data Center

The Main Data Center has a Storage Area Network infrastructure where Landscapes of various operating environments are configured.

SAN is based on the Disk Array where data volumes shared by different system servers are located. Point in Time Copy (SnapShot) and Mirror (Clone) of volumes (LUN) have been implemented on these systems. The Disk Array controllers are connected via the switch Fibre-Channel with redundancy.

In order to support various application and service areas, servers operate in a blade environment. These consist of chassis able to contain hot swappable Blade Servers. Blade Servers consist of a single component for calculation and computing (CPU, RAM, HD, controller), while the shared parts (power, cooling fans, LAN, SAN, console, CDROM, etc.) are located centrally inside the chassis.

Compared to the traditional server architecture, this option is more modular and scalable simplifying the expansion and addition of new systems. Moreover, it allows use of a hot spare server ready to replace any server that is causing an error.

Blade severs are always employed to consolidate VMware systems in order to take advantage of the scalability of the blade architecture. The company Exchange System is also connected in SAN mode in order to make full use of all the advantages this architecture offers. The system is connected with the SAN connection card (HBA – Host Bus Adapter).

Secondary Data Centers

Company ERP development systems and backup environments with the relevant Tape Library are located in Secondary Data Centers. Synchronous data replication for High Availability and Disaster Recovery operates within Secondary Data Centers. The backup system requires a designated server with the Tape Library directly connected in SCSI mode for the central management of backups. In the most critical environments backups are set up using the following method:

Disk > Disk > Tape

in other words, backups are performed using disk space of the backup server to store data saved most recently. Subsequently, the Software transfers data to the tape. This allows reduction of the backup window and, more importantly, reduces restore time.



SAN topology

SAN storage is of EMC 2 type.

The EMC 2 integration with storage uses server blades.

Server Blades

Servers used by Unimatica’s Server-Farm consist of Blades both in the Main Data Center and in Secondary Data Centers. This choice was made due to the following reasons.

  1. The blade of Server blades includes all standard accessories necessary for Unimatica’s production environment (controller, disks, HBA, Ethernet interfaces) without requiring external expansions.
  2. Both blade and rack servers are equipped with software solutions for environment management (Systems Insight Manager), installation and recovery (Rapid Deployment Pack).

VMware: server virtualization

Server-Farms have server blades with VMware ESX Server Software.


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Backup system

Centralized administration allows the scalable management of distributed backup and remote servers. An intuitive interface and wizard simplify data protection and recovery processes for every user level and network size.

A series of powerful agents and options helps to protect data of servers based on Windows, Linux and UNIX, and on desktops and laptops.

The Back-Up system manages various backup libraries in Unimatica’s main Server-Farm and in secondary Data Centers.

Backup Software

Unimatica Server-Farm backup activities are performed using relevant software components.