Tennis Point, Europe’s largest online tennis retail store, also operates 13 physical stores in the DACH region. It boasts a revenue exceeding 70 million Euros and continues to grow
This business embarked on its journey nearly 20 years ago as a start-up and has since experienced rapid growth. Presently, it dispatches over 5000 packages daily and has expanded through new business acquisitions. Accommodating such growth required an enhanced datacenter, and as Fabian Lauer, Head of Technology, notes, “Virtualization was the key to success.” Jens Hennig’s assistance over the years with datacenter virtualization led to a current rate of 90% virtualization, as Lauer adds. Currently, the Tennis-Point datacenter hosts approximately 250 virtual machines across 8 hosts, in addition to the infrastructure for the VDI, which itself is another success story.
Experiencing rapid growth, Tennis-Point faced the challenge of frequently needing to expand the capacity of its legacy FCoE storage, which led to performance issues. According to Fabian Lauer, “Our logistics processes and SAP required prioritizing storage, necessitating a solution that would enhance agility while managing complexity.“
Jens Hennig proposed exploring Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). “HCI allows us to integrate storage, compute, and networking into a single system,” explained Hennig. “While Tennis-Point’s traditional three-tier infrastructure has been effective over the years, the business’s rapid growth required a simplified infrastructure. We reassessed the requirements and the optimal HCI solution.” Tennis-Point’s existing hardware was already compatible with a broad range of hardware components certified by VMware.
Hennig, a VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) at comdivision, stated, “Compared to other HCI vendors like Nutanix, the TCO model clearly favored vSAN.” The company’s extensive use of VMware in their datacenter and EUC infrastructure facilitated smooth learning curves and interoperability.
With vSAN, Tennis-Point established a management cluster that supports SAP and various logistics applications for monitoring, backup, and storage. In the event of an outage, vSAN also provides robust protection for management. Additionally, vSAN enables Tennis-Point to incrementally decide on the need for additional capacity, I/O performance, CPU, or RAM. Fabian Lauer commended the comdivision team, “Jens and his team did a fantastic job. We completed the transition in two weeks,” he continued, “but the real triumph was moving our most critical systems in just one weekend!”
