Transcript
I'm your special guest host of today's episode. My name is Tobias Föhler, and I'm the director of sales EMEA. At PodMagic, we are exploring how simple, reliable technology can support you and the people you serve. Whether you're running branch offices, manufacturing plants, retail stores, or supporting customers on their front lines of on-premise virtualization challenges. Our goal is to bring you interesting guests, delivering real value, and have a bit of fun along the way. This episode is definitely a special one. It was recorded at our technical roundtable in Germany in 2026, where we spent several exciting hours exchanging ideas and discussing what's coming next for Stormagic and our channel partners. Over the next few minutes, you will hear firsthand insights from one of our channel partners about their journey with Stormagic, their day-to-day business requirements, and the customer challenges they are solving with us. So let's get into it. So, I've been in the business since 2010, I was part of the PLT Networks, a partner company in Luxembourg. At the beginning of 2012, we split up, and since then, we've been called Kessler Saal. Saal is a Luxembourgish GmbH. Since then, we've been independent, and we have a good 30 people, of which we are very proud. We are Siemens Solution partners in all three disciplines, the only company in all of Luxembourg. Well, Luxembourg is small, has fewer inhabitants than Cologne. I think we are currently at 680,000 or something like that. They are growing strongly. They want to reach one million in the whole country. Well, and we hold these certificates in all three disciplines. So once in classic factory automation, that is, PLCs, so SPS world, yes. Then Industrial Strengths Network, that's where it goes in the direction of networks, cybersecurity, a lot too. Siemens has a lot to catch up on, as you know from the news. And Process Control. These are the leading systems that we are recording on virtual classes. Yes, then here, my personal top three, the challenges. In the industry, everything is about availability. We had cases, shortly before Christmas, the customer calls, Nicolas, the block is here, something is wrong. Then we moved out. Then we had to see what was going on. Then a network completely broke up. And the problem in the industry is, on the one hand, when my controllers, so these are special construction groups that process these functions. For example, they look, my tank now has 100 degrees, it's getting too hot now, now the cooling has to start. So I have all these functions, so this field level. And on top of that I have my OT world. That's what my virtual cluster is called, my virtual machines for my control system. The problem is simply, if my IT doesn't work anymore, then the controller level continues in the background. But I can, it's like an airplane, I'm blind, I'm completely blind. And then they turn off a block. And in that case it was like this, an 1100 megawatt block in Holland, it makes electricity for over a million households. And if they are blind, they have to turn it off. And that is extremely expensive for the customer to start this again. And that also puts stress on the boiler. So you have to imagine, with such a power plant, the boiler alone, as you know it from home, for an oil heater, it is so high. In such a power plant it is 120 meters high. And they are not built for this, they are often turned on and off. And that's why the availability, everything has to work together cleanly. It should be available 24 hours a day if possible. Where did we start? We had around 2009 when we virtualized the first control systems. At that time, classic, two ESXi servers, bare metal workstation for operation, and a QNAP NAS for backup. That was about 2009. The problem is, if I have to go down and restart an ESXi, because all VMs that run on it are gone, they are not operable, they are not available. A big disadvantage. Then came the shared storage. We also started very small. All in view of the cost pressure. Of course, there were technical solutions that could have done this. But in the industry, selling storage to someone for 100,000 euros is extremely difficult. They didn't have a budget for that. So you could say that this small cluster, at that time in the price range with services, with everything around 250,000 euros. With everything around it. Then shared storage. So classic and Synology or QNAP offered via iSCSI to the VMware cluster. Then had the advantage, okay, I can boot my ESXi without my firms being available anymore. Then ActiveSync. Then we introduced the EQLs from Dell, Dell Ecologic. They have redundant controllers, also the gigabit connection, so they were relatively performant. ActiveSync, however, has the disadvantage that I have to switch my iSCSI volumes by hand. We thought about how we could optimize that. We also looked with VMware VISA, but completely software-defined. Well, pricey, well, not all that great. And then he said, he came to me, his name was Eric Rose, and said, you know Stromagic? No. No? Ah, from UK, you should try it out, it's really cool. Bye bye. And he himself worked in Belgium for the chemical industry. So, okay. And then we, I don't remember, I think we called the central office in Bristol, via e-mail, took a test image and tested it, and were very, very happy with the result. Why? Because the system, the system was able to do exactly what we needed. So, a good availability, and also in the event of an error, that my virtual machines automatically drive up on the other side, even if one server was completely full. And that happened automatically. Other systems couldn't do that before. Another advantage you also use is our encryption, and it's a key management system. Exactly, so what we use is this. Which is also not insignificant in this environment. Exactly, what we also use is this, it's probably not used that often, I think it's a very cool solution, the SVKMS for SVSAN, so to use this key management server to encrypt my volumes accordingly. We now also use this as standard on all systems. Away from passwords under the keyboard, to a clean key management. Exactly, exactly, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Yes, that's how it is here, I've already mentioned it a little bit, the advantages from our perspective. So I really have a real high availability, which just works. I am very flexible, I can scale it from a very small 2TB to a very large system, 48TB, as I need it right now. I design the hardware myself, I can choose what I need for it myself. I have the encryption, and what I find extremely important is service. Because you hear about the service desert, Germany, whatever, you call somewhere, you don't get any help. We are ourselves, it is important to us that we provide our customers with good service, if they have a problem, that they just take care of us, that there is simply someone there who just takes care of you. And so far at Snowmagic, you call, and if they are hard nuts, then Marc goes to them and says, Hey guys, what's up? Then he chooses himself, and then we look together. And that really on a very short service, totally uncomplicated, I think that's really good too. That's really mega good, I have to say how it is. And of course the price performance, the price point plays a huge role. We can clearly sell mega expensive systems, that doesn't work. The system is like that, from what it drinks, from the price performance, a top solution, I have to say how it is. So from our perspective, here maybe briefly a little, that was a project in long-distance heating, long-distance heating network, long-distance heating power plant, that generates heat for 200,000 inhabitants, but also for hospitals, for a slaughterhouse, for a school. And here we also went, we threw out an old system, that was an HP system, this, what is it called, SimpliVity or something. Probably the VSA at that time, I'm not sure. That didn't work that well, at least one server was gone, nothing worked anymore. We exchanged that against Stormagic. And here is a big stop. We were only allowed, we could only stop once from this main controller, with which the long-distance pumps are powered. These are huge pumps and they push this, you can imagine this long-distance heating network, it's huge, like a crane, that runs through the whole warehouse in this case. And we were only allowed to make one stop, where these pumps went out and then only had a time window of three to four hours and everything had to run again. And that is also the challenge in the industry. And that worked well. And of course, everywhere, DarkSide, you just go to Google, or it starts with the license activation, we have to do everything offline. Most of our customers are DarkSide. Nothing with remote service. Remote service, yes, but the clusters themselves, they don't hang on the Internet. That's all completely scrapped. That's why. And we used a PC7 system. The whole system offers a software redundancy. That means every server is there twice in itself. But also with the topic of backup, what I showed at Agent earlier, the problem is, if we go to a VMware cluster and we do a backup with Veeam, then it works like this, that he first takes a snapshot, copies it over, so he takes the data out, makes a backup out there and at the very end he deletes this snapshot, when he's done with the backup. And the moment he deletes it, it can happen that the network connection from the VM is interrupted for a very short time. The lead systems are sometimes extremely sensitive. And then it short-circuits and we have the alarm list full of alarms, because this server is not available for a short time. And that's why we have to go there and install the agent to do that via Volume Shadow Copying. To give you a little idea, to see where we are running live and in real life, that you heard from a colleague, who now has a special use case. I mean, to switch off a remote thermal power plant and to start it up again, you don't just do that. And it's strong to see, well, you don't have to convince me of it, I know how good we are, but it's strong to see how brilliantly Stormagic is running there and what we're doing for you in terms of data and also for the end customer, even in such a dark side, in such a somewhat special environment, with SVKMS. If you don't have that on your screen anymore, SVKMS, our key management system, is still there. So it's still there, still running. So forget the post-its under the keyboard or on the screen. Take a look, it's not that expensive either. I think a stack of post-its costs more in the end, over the year, when you have to write new ones again. All right. Thank you, Nico. Yes, then, Tobi, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
