EGGER Case Study
For global manufacturers, downtime in mission-critical applications can severely disrupt production and logistics, making reliable high availability essential. EGGER Group, a wood-based materials manufacturer with 22 facilities across 11 countries, relied on SIOS LifeKeeper for Linux to protect its SAP, Oracle, and custom applications. By achieving 99.99% uptime for over two decades, EGGER Group has enhanced system resilience and simplified management across virtual, on-premises, and cloud environments. Read the full case study to learn from their experience.
How does SIOS LifeKeeper support high availability for large, global operations?
SIOS LifeKeeper is designed to keep business-critical applications running, even in complex, distributed environments. At EGGER Group, which operates 22 manufacturing facilities in 11 countries and manages 5,000+ virtual machines on 350 physical servers, LifeKeeper underpins their high availability (HA) strategy.
Key ways it supports HA at this scale include:
- Consistent uptime: EGGER reports 99.99% uptime across critical applications for more than two decades, with nearly zero unplanned downtime.
- Protection for diverse workloads: LifeKeeper safeguards SAP HANA, Oracle databases, customized PostgreSQL environments, SAP application servers, and internal printing and logistics services, as well as other custom applications.
- Linux-first design: It fits naturally into EGGER’s Linux-based enterprise infrastructure, which they have relied on since the early 2000s.
- Virtualized HA: Since 2005, EGGER has run its entire HA infrastructure in a virtualized environment, primarily using two-node clusters for flexibility and efficiency.
For organizations with distributed operations, this approach helps ensure that critical processes—such as delivery truck dispatching, warehouse inventory, and printing—remain available and avoid costly production delays or logistical bottlenecks.
What makes SIOS LifeKeeper easier to manage and maintain than traditional clustering?
EGGER’s datacenter team needed an HA solution that was highly reliable but also straightforward to run over the long term. They selected SIOS LifeKeeper after evaluating open source and traditional clustering options because it simplified both setup and ongoing operations.
Key management and maintenance advantages include:
- Easy to use, nearly maintenance-free: EGGER’s Manager of Datacenter Operations notes that the solution is easy to use and requires very little ongoing maintenance, contributing to nearly zero downtime.
- GUI and CLI options: A GUI-based interface simplifies configuration and reduces setup errors, while a CLI is available for advanced users and scripted operations.
- Effortless updates: Maintenance and upgrades can typically be performed without taking systems offline, which helps avoid planned downtime windows.
- Improved system resilience: A robust design and minimal bugs reduce the risk of outages and unplanned interventions.
For teams managing thousands of VMs and a mix of standard and custom services, these capabilities help reimagine HA as a manageable, day-to-day operation rather than a complex, high-risk project.
How flexible is SIOS LifeKeeper for custom applications and future growth?
SIOS LifeKeeper is built to support both off-the-shelf and bespoke workloads, which was a key requirement for EGGER as their business expanded globally.
Here’s how it addresses flexibility and growth:
- Support for custom services: The SIOS Application Recovery Kit (ARK) framework lets teams create tailored scripts and policies for their own applications. EGGER uses ARKs to adapt LifeKeeper to each critical application, including internal printing and logistics services.
- Reuse across environments: Once created, ARK-based configurations can be reused across servers and clusters, reducing complexity and standardizing HA for similar services.
- Scalable architecture: LifeKeeper performs consistently across virtual, on-premises, and cloud environments, supporting EGGER’s more than 5,000 VMs and enabling them to scale as new sites and workloads come online.
- Future-ready strategy: EGGER continues to evolve its IT landscape and remains committed to a flexible, innovation-driven infrastructure where LifeKeeper plays a central role.
- Partner and vendor support: EGGER works with ACP-IT, a leading IT provider in Germany and Austria, and benefits from SIOS’s local-language support in Germany plus global expertise, including help beyond the clustering layer.
For organizations planning for growth, this combination of customizable protection, reusable components, and multi-environment support helps reshape how HA is implemented and scaled over time.
EGGER Case Study
published by Hammer IT Consulting, Inc.
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