LRZ relies on Veeam to protect 55,000 Microsoft 365 users and enable migration from VMware to Nutanix

One of LRZ’s key responsibilities is to safeguard vital applications, research, and student data, which all reside on around 1,000 virtual machines. However, this virtualized environment lacked advanced redundancy capabilities to protect the most critical workloads against storage failures and emerging cyberthreats.

As the central IT service provider and part of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, LRZ also manages a large Microsoft Exchange Server landscape with over 100,000 users. Restoring individual mailboxes and emails is a standard request for the support team. However, the organization’s backup tool didn’t offer a quick and easy way to respond to these customer service requests efficiently, leading to time-consuming work for the LRZ team.

Furthermore, as LRZ’s partner universities started adopting Microsoft 365 cloud solutions for collaboration and file sharing, the universities also began asking for offline backups of their cloud data to ensure data sovereignty and avoid vendor lock-in. To address these requirements, the organization targeted a new data protection solution.

Stephan Peinkofer, Head of the Data Science Storage Infrastructures at LRZ, said: “We were looking to improve data protection and business continuity. We wanted to minimize the risk of ransomware threats while also streamlining backup and recovery processes.”

Initially, LRZ implemented Veeam for its huge Microsoft Exchange Server landscape, accelerating and simplifying data restores. “With Veeam we can quickly and easily recover data right from within the management console,” said Stephan Peinkofer. “Not having to use a combination of tools for a simple task helps us deliver even better and more efficient customer services.”

After experiencing Veeam’s benefits, LRZ rapidly expanded its use and now protects 1,000 mission-critical virtual machines to ensure smooth and reliable operations. “We’re a driving force in the Digital Alliance Bavaria, supporting standardization and centralization of IT services in the education sector to boost cost-efficiency,” said Stephan Peinkofer. “We back up crucial applications with Veeam such as the BayernCollab collaboration platform with over 130,000 users from 19 universities based on the Atlassian Confluence wiki software.”

Additionally, LRZ hosts approximately 2,000 virtual machines for other universities, which can also take advantage of Veeam’s benefits. With efficient storage integration, Veeam can seamlessly scale as more customers opt for the new backup service. “In the past, we offered our customers storage snapshots going back just 14 days,” said Stephan Peinkofer. “Now, we can provide much better data protection with independent, immutable backups stored cost-efficiently in Veeam’s hardened Linux repositories with 90 days data retention. All our customers have to do is to check a box on the order form, everything else is fully automated.”

When certain Bavarian universities began migrating to Microsoft 365 cloud services, LRZ deployed Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to offer cloud-independent, immutable offline backups. “The Veeam solution is easy to set up and intuitive to use,” said Stephan Peinkofer. “The self-service portal enables our partner universities to manage and restore backups flexibly. We’re protecting about 350 TB of important research and student data for over 55,000 users across several institutions. We expect the number of users and universities to grow substantially over the coming years.”

To deepen its partnership with Veeam, LRZ has joined the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program to complement its service portfolio with Veeam Cloud Connect. Other universities running their own virtual machines and Veeam backups can now store remote backups at LRZ to further strengthen resiliency and add another layer of protection against ransomware attacks.

Looking ahead, Veeam Data Platform will also support LRZ’s planned hypervisor migration from VMware to Nutanix AHV. “Using Veeam, we can reduce the business risk of our planned virtualization platform migration and ensure business continuity throughout the process,” said Stephan Peinkofer. “Veeam offers us the data portability we need to confidently go ahead with our move to Nutanix to save costs and optimize operations.”

• Protects 350 TB of Microsoft 365 data for over 55,000 users across multiple universities
  With Veeam, LRZ ensures data sovereignty for a public cloud collaboration and file sharing suite widely used across the Bavarian education sector and offers a cost-efficient backup-as-a-service solution for universities and other education institutions.
• Enables reliable business continuity for 1,000+ virtual machines, even during a hypervisor migration
  “Changing hypervisors is always a challenge,” said Stephan Peinkofer. “With Veeam, we can minimize the risk and be sure that during any stage of our move, we can restore up-to-date, tested and verified backups reliably to continue operations on both platforms if necessary, reducing the potential impact on our users.”
• Expands cloud services with seamless restores, powerful ransomware protection, longer backup retention, and remote off-site backups
  Stephan Peinkofer said: “Partnering with Veeam, we can broaden the standardized services we offer to the university and higher education community in Bavaria. Better data protection, improved usability and completely new capabilities help us to innovate our customer services.”