INTA pushes the boundaries of scientific research in aerospace, security and defense by enabling never-fail access to data

The Business Challenge

As a public research, development and innovation organization, Spain’s National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) aims to advance knowledge in aerospace, aeronautics, hydrodynamics, security and defense technologies. INTA also provides technological services to companies in industry as well as to companies in higher education and research institutions.

To help users develop the technology of tomorrow, INTA’s IT team seeks to support them with the very best technological solutions available today. Jesús Garrido Antonio, CIO at INTA, said: “Our goal is to continually evolve our IT infrastructure, so that it empowers our end users to do their best work.”

In pursuit of scientific discoveries, INTA’s research teams spend their time collaborating using the organization’s digital services. If users cannot access data reliably, it can slow down progress. INTA recognized that its existing data protection technology was failing to keep up with changing requirements.

“If a user accidentally deletes an important email, we need to be able to restore that to them quickly,” said Garrido. “Equally, if a system fails, then we aim to recover data and restart operations as soon as possible. Our previous backup solution was not capable of delivering results quickly or dynamically”

INTA began looking for an alternative data protection solution that could provide more granular control over backups. With an eye on the future, the organization’s IT team wanted technology that could integrate with multiple types of hardware, support its path to cloud and optimize resource utilization.

“To recover a single email, a backup administrator had to restore a user’s entire mailbox and look for the right entry manually,” said Garrido. “We wanted to streamline workflows without getting locked into our current set of technology vendors and allowing us to connect to the cloud. As a public organization, we’re always looking to do more with less. We suspected there was a more efficient approach to backups out there if we could find it.”

The Veeam solution

Working closely with Syvalue, INTA deployed Veeam Availability Suite to protect data across its IT environment, which includes 80 TB of project data, 300 Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs), 2,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, Microsoft Active Directory and one SAP HANA server.

“We narrowed our choices down to Veeam or Rubrik, and selected Veeam because that freed us from purchasing specific backup hardware,” Garrido said. “Veeam is winning market share as more organizations, including us, discover the compelling functionality its solutions offer. Syvalue has been a partner of ours for a long time, and this is another of the many successful projects we’ve worked on together — we make a great team.”

Supported by Veeam technology, INTA runs daily incremental and full weekend backups for all systems except for its file servers, which are backed up incrementally each day, on top of a monthly full backup.

“Backup jobs now complete faster than before, and use fewer resources,” said Garrido. “We’re confident that the Veeam solution works better with virtualized environments than anyone else in the marketplace. It analyzes VMs to make incremental changes to backups and save storage space – our backup administrators were amazed the first time it ran. The deduplication features also contribute to greater efficiency.”

INTA is taking advantage of role delegation to empower members of the IT team to recover data with pinpoint control. As a result, the team can now respond faster to data retrieval requests from users.

“Using Veeam Availability Suite, it is no longer just backup administrators who can restore systems,” said Garrido. “We can also recover with much greater granularity. For example, we can pull up a single email using the built-in search function, rather than restoring an entire system and looking through it manually. With Veeam, scientists and engineers get their hands on the data they need sooner, so they can get back to focusing on their research.”

Today, INTA retains two backups at its data center. In future, the organization plans to save a third backup in the cloud and will use Veeam Backup & Replication to facilitate this move. INTA is also exploring the use of complementary Veeam solutions.

“Veeam Availability Suite will help us increase our resilience even further with a third backup in the cloud,” said Garrido. “So far, it’s been straightforward to use Veeam technology, so we’re sure it will be the same for cloud integration. Next, we’re investigating how Veeam Availability Orchestrator and Veeam ONE could augment our capabilities. One thing is for sure: Veeam technology will meet our backup needs for years to come.”

The Results

• Accelerates innovation through data restore in minutes rather than hours:
  Enables INTA’s scientists and engineers to get their hands on the data they need faster, avoiding interruptions to research, development and innovation activities.
• Promotes business agility, avoiding vendor lock-in so INTA can make optimal technology decisions:
  With a backup solution that supports hardware from almost any storage provider, INTA can choose the systems that best support their users.
• Improves efficiency by saving on storage space and backup management:
  Veeam technology streamlines workflows and optimizes resource utilization.