Case Study

co.don® AG

Stratus® everRun® VM delivers always-on availability to ensure pharmaceutical compliance

co.don® AG is a leading biopharmaceutical company, instrumental in the areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Founded in 1997, it develops, produces, and distributes human tissue engineering therapeutics intended for orthopedic and neurosurgery treatments for conditions such as hernias and bone fractures. The company is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

The Situation

co.don holds all its patient details on its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and is legally obligated to ensure the constant availability of the system and to prevent the loss of patient data. The company’s IT systems consist of both virtual and physical servers hosting mission critical applications.

Quick Facts

Solution Profile

  • Compliance requirements in pharmaceutical industry requires stringent protection of patient records, research data, and financial information
  • Always-on availability of mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, virtualized in Citrix XenServer environment
  • Easy administration and low installation costs compared to alternative clustering solutions
  • Test server used for all software in use by company is always in a ready state and all the programs are checked

Products

  • Stratus® everRun® VM software

The Solution

co.don conducted an evaluation to identify an application availability solution that would meet the strict requirements of its ERP system. The company needed continuously available servers to be able to store pharmaceutical compliance data, research data, and financial information. co.don chose Stratus® everRun® VM software because it offered always-on availability for its ERP systems, with easy administration and low installation costs—especially compared to alternative clustering solutions. A combination of everRun VM, which is designed to prevent outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures, and a cluster system was identified as the best solution for co.don’s requirements. co.don realized it was nearly impossible to use a standard pre-configured solution—those solutions proposed by the ERP solution providers did not meet the company’s availability needs. The ERP system was migrated to a Citrix XenServer™ virtual environment and was developed to meet the company’s exact requirements.

“I’ve been very impressed with the convenience of the management console for everRun and I was able to install it in-house, safe in the knowledge that the security of our Citrix XenServer was not at risk.”
Alexander Witkowski
Systems Administrator and Administrator for IT
co.don

The Results

Alexander Witkowski, Systems Administrator and Administrator for IT at co.don explains his reasons for choosing everRun VM, “We’ve been using Stratus everRun HA high availability solution for physical servers since 2006 and have not had any downtime since then. This made it an easy decision to also use a Stratus product to protect our virtual servers. I was able to use a test server to test all the software that we currently use. With everRun VM, this server is always in a ready state and all the programs are checked.”

The manufacturing of pharmaceutical products is one of the most regulated areas in Germany, which is why it is crucial that co.don’s mission-critical applications are always available. The loss of data within only a few minutes of downtime can be expensive and affect patient’s lives. Stratus everRun VM offers easy-to-use, automated, and cost-effective protection for co.don’s mission-critical ERP system and ensures that the company is compliant with the various regulations.

“We’ve been using Stratus everRun HA high availability solution for physical servers since 2006 and have not had any downtime since then. This made it an easy decision to also use a Stratus product to protect our virtual servers”
Alexander Witkowski
Systems Administrator and Administrator for IT
co.don

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