Scaling data resilience: How DATEV achieves 100% protection for 20 PB of data with Veeam

Powering Germany’s digital backbone, DATEV provides critical infrastructure that supports over 2.8 million businesses, organizations, and municipalities. As a trusted engine behind the nation’s economy, DATEV generates more than 14 million pay slips every month and has a reputation built on rock-solid reliability and uncompromising data security.

Driven by innovation, DATEV continues to expand its portfolio, now offering more than 300 advanced software and cloud solutions that span accounting, HR, business consulting, taxes, and more. Behind the scenes, the company navigates a vast landscape of complex systems and ever-growing data volumes.

“Our mission is to make our customers more efficient and productive,” said Michel Hiltmann, Product Owner of WS Backup Open Systems at DATEV eG. “To deliver reliable cloud hosting services and SaaS solutions, we rely on uninterrupted data availability. Managing 20,000 VMs and annual data growth of 20%, we need a data resilience solution that’s as fast, scalable, and automated as the services we deliver to our clients.”

To ensure uninterrupted service for millions of customers, DATEV turned to Veeam Software for powerful, enterprise-grade business continuity. What set Veeam apart was its ability to deliver seamless multi-hypervisor protection from a single, unified platform.

“Veeam gives us a reliable, standardized solution that streamlines backup and recovery across all our clusters, systems, and environments,” said Hiltmann. “With one tool, we quickly secured 20,000 VMs by running client applications on Microsoft Hyper-V and another 5,000 internal services on VMware vSphere, boosting productivity across our data centers.”

As DATEV’s private cloud expanded, so has its use of Veeam’s robust features and integrations. With Veeam ONE, DATEV gains deep visibility into backup performance, while automated reporting identifies optimization opportunities and keeps the company audit-ready for regulatory compliance.

“Veeam has always set the standard for data resilience,” said Rudolf Ochsenkühn, Deputy Product Owner of WS Backup Open Systems at DATEV eG. “Veeam’s R&D team works closely with us to ensure the solution scales with our enterprise needs, and they constantly innovate to support new technology stacks to further strengthen data portability, future-proofing our data protection across virtual, physical, and cloud workloads.”

Veeam now protects a diverse mix of systems for DATEV, including Windows and Linux VMs that run DATEV business applications, Microsoft SQL Server and SAP HANA databases, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for in-house software developers and customers. Tight integrations with VMware vCenter and SAP HANA cockpit give system admins real-time visibility into backup status, right from their familiar management tools.

With demand for specialized IT skills at an all-time high, DATEV is taking advantage of Veeam’s powerful automation to boost staff productivity. By using the Veeam PowerShell extension, the company is enriching and accelerating workflows with customized scripts to tailor backup scheduling to its specific needs. Features such as HotAdd proxies are helping DATEV to achieve 4x backup performance improvements for some systems, leading to improved utilization levels and cost-efficiencies at scale.

To further strengthen cyber resilience and defend against ransomware, the company maintains immutable backups of more than 12 PB of business data. Synthetic full backups enable efficient tape archiving, while Veeam Threat Hunter automates malware detection during data recovery.

Looking ahead, DATEV is deepening its partnership with Veeam through a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM), gaining access to expert guidance and best practices to maximize the value of its investment. The company is also evaluating Veeam Data Cloud and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to bring next-level resilience to productivity apps in the public cloud.

• Achieves a 100% backup success rate at an enterprise scale for heterogeneous server clusters with 25,000 VMs and over 12 PB of data
  “We definitely strengthened our cyber resilience with Veeam,” said Hiltmann. “It offers true enterprise-ready scalability that supports our rapid growth. And because Veeam and Microsoft are working closely together to further optimize integration and performance, we are confident that Veeam will continue to advance and remain at the leading edge of technology.”
• Streamlines key IT support tasks by recovering data up to 25 times every day
  “The high quality of backups and smooth recovery processes enable highly efficient support services,” said Ochsenkühn. “At our scale, we receive support requests to recover data all the time. With Veeam, it’s very quick and easy for our first-level support to help our customers.”
• Delivers highly efficient, automated and scalable resiliency with 1,000 VMs managed by each backup server
  By fine-tuning backup schedules and finding the ideal ratio of management servers to VMs across its 30 Veeam servers, DATEV achieved high resource efficiency. Veeam’s inline deduplication and compression features also reduce infrastructure and storage costs.