Seeing our customers’ ideas run as web applications is our daily drive. To ensure that this is guaranteed in the long term, we are constantly expanding and optimizing the hosting environment. In this regard, a lot has happened at WorNet in recent months:

Relocation of the 2nd location to M-Net

Some applications require a special degree of reliability. For this purpose, we offer two locations where we operate your web applications.

Data center 2 had to move in the spring to create space for new things. We looked at several data centers in and around Munich and chose the M-Net data center in Weimarer Straße because it best meets the demands of our customers in terms of access concept, connection and equipment. It is also ISO 27001:2013 certified.

When you move into a new location, the opportunity is good to modernize a few things “in one go”. For example, the VMware vSphere environment was updated to version 6.0 and additional capacity was created.

Expansion of the network connection

The Internet connection to M-Net was expanded to 1 GBit and a 1 GBit line was also laid in the data center 1 in Pettenkoferstraße. As a result, both locations benefit from the extended network connection and create capacity for cross-site data exchange.

New storage technology: vSAN

Previously, our virtual machines stored their data on iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage systems. With VMware vSAN, a new storage technology is now available in which the data of the virtual machines is distributed to different virtualization servers. Dedicated storage systems are no longer needed. This has a number of advantages:

• Better availability: all data is mirrored to multiple servers. The failure of a server does not affect access to the data.
• more performance: each hard drive group is accompanied by a fast SSD. The SSD buffers read and write processes and accelerates them considerably. Due to the high requirements for robustness and write strength, high-end SSDs are used here.
• Scalability: As more disk capacity is needed, so does the need for virtualization resources. By providing CPU, RAM and disk capacity as a unit, the storage capacity automatically grows with it.
• The SSD also serves as a read cache. The SSD share of the net capacity is 30% for us. This means that almost all read accesses come immediately from the SSD cache.
• Rapid write access: Web applications essentially cause write access for database changes and log files. It helps enormously if every write access from the virtual machine’s point of view is completed when the data has been stored on two SSDs. The copying of the data to magnetic disks happens imperceptibly in the background.

we introduced vSAN technology for the first time in Cluster 2 in Weimarerstraße. Based on the consistently positive experience, we are currently equipping Cluster 3 with it and are also moving it to the M-Net data center.