BSH Hausgeräte GmbH achieves high data availability and resilience with Veeam

BSH is always looking for ways to operate more efficiently. The company saw an opportunity to achieve this goal by embracing the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) to create hyperconnected factories using sensors to optimize and automate processes. This shift is making BSH more dependent on high data availability than ever before.

“Our factories are rolling out new IT equipment all the time that increases data volumes and the complexity of our production processes,” said Sebastian Götz, IT Infrastructure Service Manager for Storage and Backup at BSH. “Our challenge is to ensure that we avoid any downtime, even as we implement more sophisticated technologies.”

As BSH evolved, its need for non-disruptive data backup and recovery processes grew. The company looked for a versatile data protection solution that could safeguard its increasingly diverse IT environment with minimal impact on production processes.

“In the past, our factories managed their own data backup and recovery processes for manufacturing clients,” said Götz. “We realized that we could improve on this approach and began searching for the right toolset to support us.”

To support connected factories at BSH, the company selected Veeam as its data protection solution of choice. Veeam offers BSH the versatility to enable high data availability and resilience across the company’s fast-evolving IT environment.

“Over time, we’ve adapted our IT infrastructure so that it is now 98% virtualized,” said Kalle Deutinger, Head of Location Infrastructure Service BSH. “Veeam was a natural choice to protect our virtualized systems, and we were delighted to discover it was just as good at protecting our physical servers too, giving us a single point of control in one easy-to-manage solution.”

BSH now centrally manages data protection by using Veeam to back up its entire diverse IT infrastructure, which includes Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines (VMs) running on VMware vSphere hypervisor software. Mission- critical systems include the company’s Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases and IoT applications.

“Our largest data volume is 5TB and Veeam doesn’t even blink when backing it up,” said Deutinger. “When we first introduced Veeam, it accelerated our backups by five times and our recovery by 10 times. It’s also grown alongside the company, so no matter what new data sources or applications we roll out, we’re confident that they’re comprehensively protected with Veeam.”

BSH recently had to call on Veeam when a factory flooded in Slovenia. The company’s IT team moved fast to support the local factory in minimizing downtime.

“By using Veeam we were able to recover local IT infrastructure in a very short time,” said Deutinger. “We were happy we could support our colleagues very effectively in such a big disaster situation.”

Using Veeam, BSH increases efficiency, ensuring data is well-protected while freeing up resources for innovation. The company also takes advantage of Veeam’s integrated security features to bolster cyber-resilience measures.

“The deduplication and compression features built into Veeam are helping us make better use of resources,” said Götz. “For example, one of the backup jobs for a facility in Turkey includes 500 VMs and 130TB of data, yet it only requires 2.4TB of data transfer for incremental backups, which is incredibly resource efficient.”

“We’re also moving towards adding extra layers of resilience to our data protection environment with Veeam,” continued Deutinger. “So far, we’ve begun using it to make multiple backups stored to different locations. We continuously explore new features like immutability, putting us in a better position than ever before.”

• Boosted efficiency and reduced risk through powerful, centralized data protection for global operations 
  BSH now has a single point of control for data backup and recovery across its diverse IT environment, increasing resilience and cutting down on administrative requirements.
• Simplified operations, requiring only a small team to manage data protection 
  Veeam is very easy to manage,” said Deutinger. “This is crucial for us, because it helps us to run our large backup and recovery environment effectively with a very small team.”
• Saved on storage costs through deduplication and compression 
  The deduplication and compression features built into Veeam are helping us make better use of resources,” said Götz. “For example, one of the backup jobs for a facility in Turkey includes 500 VMs and 130TB of data, yet it only requires 2.4TB of data transfer for incremental backups, which is incredibly resource efficient.”