McData Corp., which produces storage-networking products, has partnered with Porsche Informatik Osterreich, a subsidiary of Porsche Austria, and Vienna-based IT service provider T-Systems Debis Systemhaus CAE to develop an IT-based car dealership support system.
Porsche will utilize McData’s enterprise to edge technology during the first phase of development to create highly available application service provider (ASP) solutions accessible to 80 Volkswagen and Audi dealerships throughout Austria.
Officials said Porsche dealers gain the benefit of performance, manageability and availability to all data applications needed for their business, including the sale of new and used cars, spare parts and service — without additional investment of their own. The second phase of the project will include the installment of a fail-proof data center.
To meet Porsche’s data needs, T-Systems Austria and McData are implementing a solution that delivers 99.999 percent availability and is interoperable with existing storage systems in an open, multi-vendor storage area network. The solution is built with ES-1000 Loop Switches and McData ED-5000 Directors, which ensure 99.999 percent availability — the highest availability for core-switching architecture — fail-over logic, hot code load and activation and redundant power and cooling throughout. The technology solution ensures secure access by all participants to a self-contained data pool — a simple expansion of Porsche’s existing hard drives would not meet this requirement, officials said.
Realizing Porsche’s need to provide both small and large dealerships with constant access to information via its network, the new ASP service will be expanded in the future to include Porsche, Seat and Skoda partners.
Educational and support services for the Porsche solution will be provided by McData’s European headquarters in Ottobrunn, Germany.