Federal Police

About the Federal Police

With approximately 49,000 employees, the Federal Police is a nationwide authority of high operational value. It is represented at more than one hundred locations and is present at all major transportation infrastructure points in Germany. Thus, it makes a significant contribution to maintaining internal security in the Federal Republic of Germany. When the reorganization of the Federal Police came into effect in 2008, the largest police reform at the federal level also had direct impacts on operations and the underlying information technologies. From the beginning, SVA supported the Federal Police in consolidating its IT infrastructure to design and implement a holistic, virtualized SAN and storage architecture based on the IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and IBM Storwize V7000 disk units at the Berlin and Koblenz locations.

Challenge: Modernizing the IT Infrastructure

Over the past ten years, the demands from departments and the increasing number of specialized applications have steadily grown. New challenges also emerged in consolidating the IT infrastructure, prompting the Federal Police to consider a complete renewal and modernization of its existing IT storage infrastructure. The goal was to work with SVA to develop a powerful, future-proof and cost-effective overall solution that would enable departments to provide services flexibly, quickly and even more efficiently in the years to come.

Solution: IBM Storage Technology

Based on these requirements and proven IBM virtualization technology, SVA developed a new state-of-the-art architecture for the Berlin location. It is based on the IBM Spectrum Virtualize appliance, incorporating fast flash drives of the IBM FlashSystem FS5030 type. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is IBM’s leading software-defined storage solution, proven over many years in the IBM SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storwize and FlashSystem. The highly available and high-performance solution was set up redundantly by mirroring across two identical systems in separate fire zones.

Monitoring with BVQ°

To monitor and analyze the systems, SVA’s Business Volume Qualicision (BVQ°) software was used, completing the overall concept. BVQ° visualizes the infrastructure in a clear and logical holistic view. This allows the Federal Police to continuously benefit from a comprehensive and transparent directory of complex technical details. BVQ° automatically alerts in case of anomalies — before problems arise — and its reporting function delivers relevant evaluations in no time. BVQ° is 100% non-intrusive, meaning no special hardware or agents need to be installed.

At the Federal Police, the BVQ° Systems Health Map plays a central role in system monitoring. With its preconfigured rules, administrators can get an overview of all systems and their current status at a glance, proactively monitoring configuration, capacity and performance thresholds. In addition to productive monitoring, the Federal Police also uses customized dashboards in Grafana to visualize the time-based progression of selected metrics. For long-term analysis, the integrated reporting in BVQ is used, providing reliable figures for expansion planning, including historical capacity trends and performance developments.

“The combination of efficient and high-performance IT storage infrastructure with targeted monitoring and analysis of capacity and performance metrics impressed us,” summarizes Dirk Schulten-Raddatz, Project Manager at the Federal Police.

SVA experts accompanied this project from the beginning and worked closely with Federal Police colleagues to ensure the new storage environment was operational in the shortest possible time.