Gascade Transport GmbH

About

GASCADE Gastransport GmbH, headquartered in Kassel, Germany, employs around 400 people and is an independent gas transmission system operator. The company plans, builds and operates gas infrastructure across Germany. With a pipeline system built to the highest technical standards, GASCADE provides competent and comprehensive transport services, directly connecting five European countries and ensuring secure energy supply for Germany and Europe - now and in the future.

Challenge

GASCADE operates two distinct areas within its IT storage infrastructure - the office and process networks - both utilizing IBM Spectrum Virtualize in combination with IBM V5000 Storwize systems as backend storage. To analyze performance and capacity needs and ensure high availability, a solution is required that enables easy and effective monitoring.

The IT administration team at GASCADE is responsible not only for the storage infrastructure but also for many other tasks. Therefore, an additional service is needed to proactively review current performance and capacity utilization on a monthly basis and to evaluate the results using deep expertise in the deployed storage systems. These evaluated insights should help GASCADE identify potential bottlenecks and ensure long-term high availability of its storage infrastructure.

“The monthly reports - evaluated by an SVA storage specialist - provide us with significant added value regarding the current health of our storage infrastructure and future planning. Additionally, BVQ offers full flexibility with its extensive monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing us to perform our own analyses when needed.”
- GASCADE IT Administration

Solution: BVQ° with Storage Reporting Service (SRS)

To meet these challenges, GASCADE chose the SVA software solution Business Volume Qualicision (BVQ°). Installed in the data center, BVQ° collects and stores all relevant information from the storage infrastructure. This enables precise analysis of system events and their impact on performance.

To ensure proactive monitoring without requiring deep technical expertise from GASCADE’s IT team, the BVQ° Storage Reporting Service (SRS) was introduced alongside the on-site BVQ° installation. Through a secure remote connection, an SVA storage specialist accesses the BVQ° environment once a month to generate reports on capacity and performance utilization.

These reports provide a detailed historical overview and can be used to forecast growth in capacity and performance. With deep knowledge of GASCADE’s systems, the SVA specialist identifies potential bottlenecks and future requirements, which are then discussed and planned collaboratively with the customer. Additionally, the on-site BVQ° installation includes predefined favorites for common use cases, allowing GASCADE’s IT team to perform their own analyses quickly and easily. Monitoring dashboards offer a continuous overview of the entire storage infrastructure on a single page. Alerts can be configured to automatically notify the IT team via email when defined thresholds are exceeded - without requiring active analysis in BVQ°.

Full Flexibility and Expert Support

GASCADE now benefits from full flexibility in conducting its own analyses while relying on the expertise of SVA’s storage specialists. This combination ensures both operational efficiency and long-term planning security for the company’s critical IT infrastructure.