The ”Unternehmensberatung Fröschle” was founded in the year 1990 and therefore can look back onto decades of experience in the IT business, specifically  in the areas Storage and Backup. It is particularly interesting to see how rapidly the development goes on and always produces steadily new innovations and improvements.

From the variety of different projects and activities I have picked out only a small part of my most interesting challenges and briefly described it in the following.

Raimund Fröschle
Technical Consultant and
Senior Instructor

Since more than 15 years I am travelling around regularly as an instructor for one of the worldwide biggest storage manufacturers and teach various trainings from the EMC Proven Professional Program. The subjects always cover the latest technology and mainly deal with the implementation and configuration of the different Storage-Systems (VMAX and VNX) as well as Replication Technologies (RecoverPoint, SRDF), Virtualization (VPLEX), Reporting (Watch4Net, SRM) and Backup (NetWorker).

Working with the most current technologies and the transfer of knowledge and experience to different types of students from foreign cultures on the entire globe makes this job so interesting.

>> Worldmap with all already visited training locations

As one of the most important partners and resellers of EMC in Europe, Orchestra cares for numerous customers if it is about Backup and Recovery, Archiving, High Availability, Replication or Storage.

Of course it is a special challenge to work for Orchestra because the customers expect the highest quality on the newest technical state at implementation and support. My trainer activity at EMC is therefore very beneficial since I can go back to a broad knowledge base at any time and of course on the other hand it is also a big advantage if practice examples and real life troubleshooting issues can be discussed in a training, which, as is well known, often have little to do with the theory.

My project at the munich airport “Flughafen München GmbH” required a high level precision when performing configuration changes at the Storage Systems, particularly when outdated storage volumes had to be teared down in order to free up space. Every mistake could have far-reaching consequences for all airline passengers, e.g. if no baggage can be checked in any more for a long time period. Since mistakes are human, an important rule has been introduced which does not permit configuration changes at times, in which increased air traffic has to be expected (e.g. vacation seasons).

The Storage environment to be managed contains EMC VMAX and VNX in two data centers which provide the volumes for several ESX-Clusters. A synchronous replication of the data is performed through a VPLEX Metro-Cluster. 

My main specialization on EMC products can be recognized obviously. Because of this, my project at the administrative office of taxes in Munich “Bayerisches Landesamt für Steuern” was particularly interesting for me since it offered the opportunity to get into touch with products of other vendors.

The Storage environment mainly consisted of the systems HDS USPV and AMS2300 from Hitachi. The requirements on a Storage System are clear and well defined and according to the product specification these also are fulfilled more or less by all vendors. The features provided are mostly the same, regardless whether you call it for example SRDF (EMC Symmetrix) or TrueCopy (HDS USPV).

The more interesting are the deeper insights you get with your daily administrative work, when you recognize how differently the various features are implemented and what are the small (but important) differences and restrictions at the one or at the other implementation. The same of course applies also to the very different management via GUI or command line.

The BDT AG in Rottweil is one of the most important manufacturers of Libraries, Autoloaders and Silos which are used for backups onto tape technology in conjunction with all types of backup systems.

My task was the development of automated test procedures, in which the entire functionality of the tape devices can be tested through a unified user interface and command line. Therefore the most common and the most used backup systems in the field should be recognized automatically and the configurable test cases executed by their individual command line.

Of course this development work required detailed knowledge of the different backup software, such as EMC NetWorker, Symantec BackupExec, Symantec NetBackup, CommVault Galaxy or HP Data Protector. 

I remember the project at the german center for aerospace “Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt” (DLR) as one of the most interesting and challenging. I was part of an expert team, which had the task, in the context of the european space research program "Columbus" as a part of the international space station ISS, to implement an IT architecture which provides processing, backup and archiving of the data received from the station.

The infrastructure consisted mainly of CLARiiON storage arrays from EMC as well as EMC NetWorker as the backup system which was configured in a multistage backup process to save the received data on an ADIC Scalar10k tape library with more than 70 terabytes storage capacity.

It was a special experience to be allowed to participate in the german contribution to the success of the ISS-mission and therefore to the investigation of the space.