Tennis Point is Europe’s largest online tennis retail store and also operates 13 physical stores in the DACH region. The revenue is more than 70 Million Euros and growing.
The business started out almost 20 years ago as a start-up. Since then, the growth has been rapid. More than 5000 packages are sent now out every day and new businesses were acquired. The datacenter needed to accommodate this kind of growth, “so virtualization was the key to success” knew Fabian Lauer, Head of Technology, “Jens Hennig helped us over the years with the datacenter virtualization, and we have now reached 90%” Lauer continued. Currently, roughly 250 virtual machines run on 8 hosts in the Tennis-Point datacenter – plus the infrastructure for the VDI, but that is a topic for another success story.
“We were growing so rapidly, that we constantly needed to add capacity to our legacy FCoE storage, but this meant, we were running out of performance quickly” said Fabian Lauer, “our logistics processes and SAP required us to prioritize storage, so we needed a solution that would improve agility while managing complexity”.
Jens Hennig suggested to look into Hyper Converged Infrastructure: “With HCI we can combine storage, compute, and networking into a single system” said Hennig “Tennis-Point’s traditional three-tier infrastructure served them well over the years, but now, with the rapid growth of the business, I suggested to simplify the infrastructure. We took a step back and looked at the requirements and the best solution when it came to HCI”. Tennis-Point operated hardware that was already part of the wide range of hardware components that are certified by VMware.
“Compared with other HCI vendors such as Nutanix, the TCO model clearly favoured VSAN” said Hennig, architect and VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) at comdivision. Also, since Tennis-Point already runs a big VMware footprint in their datacenter and EUC infrastructure, learning curves and interoperability where easily manageable.
With vSAN, a management cluster had been created, that helps Tennis-Point run SAP as well as several other logistics applications to handle monitoring, backup and storage. In case of an outage, vSAN also provides stable protection for management. vSAN also enables Tennis-Point to decide in small chunks, weather they need more capacity, I/O performance, CPU or RAM.
During the transition, no outages were encountered and performance increased noticeably.
Jens and his team at comdivision did a great job” Fabian Lauer said, “we finished the transition within two weeks” he continued, “but the real success story is, that we moved the most important systems in just one weekend!”.
