BSH Hausgeräte GmbH Chooses Veeam for High Availability and Enterprise Scalability

The Business Challenge

BSH Hausgeräte GmbH (BSH) manufactures high-quality products spanning the entire spectrum of home appliances. BSH is uncompromising when it comes to quality, from products to business processes. The IT team at BSH facilitates a high volume of business processes and promotes worldwide business growth through secure, stable and innovative IT operations. BSH is always on.

BSH has a massive IT infrastructure that is 90% virtualised and spans more than 65 locations. Thirty-five data centres contain 150 VMware vSphere servers that host 1,200 virtual machines (VMs). With such a distributed infrastructure, fast, easy and reliable VM backup and recovery are necessities to avoid data loss.

In the past, BSH had to manage a backup-to-tape process that was time-consuming and required manual intervention. Full backups had to be performed on weekends and incremental backups during the week. The team spent additional time deploying, managing and maintaining agents in each VM and the process of recovering VMs was too slow for their standards.

Flexibility was another concern. The backup process was constricting because it didn’t enable offsite backups. For example, VMs could not be backed up to the regional data centre in Germany; they could only be backed up onsite at each location. The data centres’ tape libraries were growing larger and larger.

“We are a global leader in home appliances and our IT team continually looks for solutions and enhanced processes that will efficiently support the high-quality demands of our business. We found that it was not cost-effective to maintain those tape libraries and problematic to deal with the occasional defective tape,” said Thomas Kaiser, IT Service Manager. “We determined we needed a solution to backup to disk rather than backup to tape and the ability to back up offsite. We also needed a backup and recovery solution that was easy to use for our distributed team spread across the globe.”

The Veeam Solution

BSH tested several backup and recovery solutions, but only one offered the winning combination of ease-of-use, high-speed recovery and data loss avoidance to serve a distributed virtual infrastructure.

BSH chose Veeam® Backup & Replication™ for fast, flexible, agentless and storageagnostic backup and recovery. Now BSH locations have backup options: They can back up their VMs to NetApp FAS, whether onsite, to a remote repository and/or to the regional data centre. Using Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots, BSH creates backups from NetApp storage snapshots as often as it likes with little to no impact on the production environment.

“The biggest advantage to Veeam’s integration with NetApp is that snapshot deletion time is reduced from hours—in some cases—to a few seconds,” said Andreas Stutzmiller, Service Manager of Site Infrastructure Services for BSH.

Veeam scales to any size environment because backup proxies can reside at any location to leverage the Veeam backup server for scheduling and load balancing. In addition, proxies can be automatically deployed and maintained, ensuring ease-of-use. Veeam enables BSH to be always on.

“There was no comparison between Veeam and the other solutions we tested,” Stutzmiller said. “Veeam gives us a complete backup and recovery solution. It’s easy to set up and use, and VM recovery with Veeam takes minutes, not hours or days.”

Because Veeam is built specifically for virtualisation it offers a number of unique availability features, such as instant recovery. A failed VM can be started directly from a backup file in the backup repository and migrated to production without disruption for fast recovery. The feature is called Instant VM Recovery®, and BSH used it when a 2TB VM for the call centre failed.

“If this VM had failed before we implemented Veeam, recovery would have taken hours or days,” Kaiser said. “We would have had to rebuild the VM, restore it and copy it back to production. During copy time, the VM would be useless to the call centre. Another advantage with Veeam is we don’t have to perform a full backup every weekend anymore, which saves valuable time and resources in our environment.”

Veeam Backup & Replication performs one full backup. All subsequent backups are incremental; therefore, just the changes from the last backup run. Veeam’s foreverincremental backup, combined with built-in deduplication and compression, reduces backup storage consumption and the amount of data sent over a company’s network.

BSH’s IT team is considering another Veeam feature: Built-in WAN Acceleration, which copies data, such as backup copies, to offsite locations up to 50 times faster than regular file copy. Built-in WAN Acceleration helps companies avoid the risk of data loss.

“This Veeam feature might be beneficial to our locations that don’t use traffic optimisers for offsite backup,” Stutzmiller said. “Veeam Backup & Replication was a good choice for us. It provides state-of-the-art backup and recovery options for our virtual environments and is easy for everyone to use across our distributed architecture.”

The Results

Provides high availability and enterprise scalability
Veeam Backup & Replication is a powerful, flexible and easy-to-use solution that provides high availability for any size VMware or Hyper-V environment. Backup proxy servers and backup repositories communicate directly with each other under the direction of a backup server. VMs are assigned to proxy servers, eliminating the need to troubleshoot backup jobs and constantly tune job schedules to achieve the right level of job concurrency. Veeam also uses intelligent load balancing that accounts for virtual environment specifics and current load on the backup infrastructure.

Saves time, is easy to use and eliminates risk
Veeam Backup & Replication is built specifically for virtualisation, making implementation and management easy. Configuration involves very little effort because multiple deployment options enable optimal use of existing resources, and wizards streamline the high-speed recovery process. As a result, enterprises save time while eliminating risk.

Delivers fast back and recovery; conserves backup storage
With Veeam Backup & Replication, VM backup at BSH is 5X faster and recovery is 10X faster. Because Veeam offers built-in deduplication, compression and foreverincremental backup, backup storage consumption decreases substantially for most enterprises, which saves money.