AUMA

House lights dim, an orchestra’s first notes fill the hall, and silent gear boxes lift a velvet curtain weighing eight tons. Actuators manage the flow of seawater during desalination before being pushed skyward for a rambunctious tot’s nightly bath in a Singapore high rise. And actuator controls in the Finnish countryside make distribution of steam heat derived from local biomass more efficient. Each event is a daily routine. And each is made possible by invaluable engineering innovations from AUMA Riester GmbH & Co. KG (AUMA). 

For more than 60 years AUMA has been one of the global leaders in designing and manufacturing components of the critical infrastructure each of us takes for granted every hour of every day. Sometimes their high-performance actuators and gearboxes are provisioned directly. Other times they’re bundled as part of an assembly by other companies. In every case, the company’s brand promise of ‘solutions for a world in motion’ couldn’t be more apt.  

Just as the movement of data revolutionizes our world as it transits desktops, networks, satellites, and smartphone screens, physical materials from clean water to natural gas, cement, and hydrogen similarly power human progress. NetApp is proud to play a central role in countless AUMA stories unfolding every day in more than 70 countries around the world. 

It’s easy to think of AUMA’s actuators as mechanisms that serve only a binary purpose—open or closed. But the larger truth is the real-world impact as those binary settings help custodians of public and private infrastructure solve highly complex challenges for our modern world, such as: 

• Effective wastewater purification to protect citizens from contamination 
• Precise adjustment of hydropower turbines to maximize investment in green energy 
• Regulation of efficient and safe geothermal energy extraction 
• Reliable activation of underwater roller gates during emergency flooding 
• Dependable distribution of chilled water in urban centers in the Middle East 

Each of these innovations today begins on an engineer’s screen through CAD design and is eventually archived as part of AUMA’s document management system (DMS). While some CAD files can head directly to cold storage, many are kept warm because an engineer’s work is seldom truly finished. Some designs are re-worked to add extra power plugs, for instance, while others are tweaked for retrofitting aging infrastructure, and equipment for the North American market is adapted to its standards of weights and measures and power generation. This flexibility is a signature of AUMA’s culture of innovation, and results in a DMS spanning a depth and breadth of designs that allow industries and municipalities to optimize resources, reduce costs, and maximize performance.  

Marcus Hammer, System Administrator of Data Center Technologies for AUMA, joined the company in 2001 as a developer for ERP applications serving the finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and human resources organizations. At the time AUMA produced about 100 actuators a day. But in short order the company’s manufacturing volume increased to three times that rate, even as a lack of technical engineers in the data center was compounded by pressures to implement a data server strategy on pace with a company following a robust growth track. Marcus says, “After just two years with the company our growth meant we needed more flexible, bigger, and better storage.” Marcus stepped up to lead the way. 

In his new data center role, he helped manage the migration away from a legacy, networked attached storage (NAS) solution better suited for a less agile environment, and toward an intelligent data infrastructure. But a unified storage strategy was just the beginning of AUMA’s data center modernization. The team also implemented SnapMirror® unified disaster recovery capability for failover from primary storage in Müllheim to secondary storage at a growing number of subsidiaries in geographically diverse sites around the globe, including in India, China, and the United States. 

AUMA’s journey to an intelligent data infrastructure provides a comprehensive example of how the world’s most important data lives on NetApp, including the company’s virtual machines (VMs). 

AUMA embraces a virtualized environment for many of their databases, giving each administrator flexibility to configure storage protocols at the VM level, whether they’re running multiple SQL Server instances; enabling SnapMirror replication for storage volumes; or, setting up a virtual machine within VMware to access files and directories on network file system (NFS) datastores. A change in configuration on any one VM doesn’t require reconfiguration across the entire ecosystem, giving data admins greater independence and freedom to manage their data according to their unique business needs. 

This virtualization is part and parcel of AUMA’s larger, data modernization strategy. Marcus says, “There’s no system running standalone here because we use NetApp SnapVault archiving capabilities to replicate all data from all systems to different data centers in our company.” It’s a savvy playbook for a company that prioritizes disaster recovery.  

AUMA manufactures specialized technology components designed to perform specific functions, often in hazardous settings. This includes corrosive seawater and blasting desert sands, explosion-prone environments, and conditions at both extremes of ambient temperature. AUMA’s data storage strategy follows a similar line of thinking, with each solution selected for its purpose-built capabilities, even as the technology environment is reshaped by AI, ML, more. 

NetApp AFF-A Series 
All-flash storage to turbocharge mission-critical workloads like AUMA’s ERP system which runs on Oracle, with up to 40M IOPs, up to 1TB/s throughput, always-on data reduction, and proven 99.9999% availability 

NetApp^® AFF C-Series 
Scalable, efficient, and secure capacity-optimized all-flash storage for AUMA's general-purpose workloads, including file and VMware access

NetApp^® E-Series 
Hybrid flash servers for dedicated, high-bandwidth applications that need simple, fast SAN storage with enterprise-grade reliability—initially used as storage for AUMA’s ERP application, today it’s primarily a testing environment 

NetApp^® ONTAP^®
gives AUMA a single storage OS that delivers comprehensive data management across their environment. Marcus says, “Every location uses ONTAP as their management software, and also as their performance dashboard.” 

Other NetApp solutions 

• ONTAP Select 
• Cloud Volumes ONTAP 
• FAS2750 
• SanTricity 
• Ransomware Protection

AUMA’s data storage strategy is the result of a long-standing partnership among the leader in actuator manufacturing, the leader in intelligent data infrastructure, and Advanced UniByte, itself a leader in systems integration and support worldwide.  

Integration partner 
NetApp and AUMA partner Advanced UniByte is a leader in advanced storage, network, computing, and virtualization solutions, as well as technical IT integration of worldwide subsidiaries. 

AUMA’s gearboxes move us up elevators and down escalators, and their actuators play starring roles in nearly every system of today’s luxury cruise ships. These are just a few more examples of the invisible world of mechanical systems we seldom pause to appreciate. The ubiquity of AUMA’s mechanical innovations in our lives is second only to their importance.  

And the binary world of open or closed now includes the binary world of 1s and 0s, as AUMA in some ways is becoming as much a data company as a manufacturer, with a growing portion of their portfolio now connected and online. Many of today’s actuators communicate via fieldbus systems, and send self-monitored reports and performance data through the cloud to utility crews, HVAC teams, and city managers alike. It’s a final reminder that AUMA Riester solutions are purpose-built for a world in motion.