Preserving Scotland’s past, present and future: The country’s national library rises to the challenge with Veeam

If you want to get a sense of what makes the country special, the National Library of Scotland is a great place to start. With around 50 million items in its care, the Library’s collections in Edinburgh and Glasgow are available to students, researchers and the public through both personal visits and online.

Digital solutions play a critical role in the Library’s day-to-day operations, and employees rely on Microsoft 365 applications including Teams, Outlook and SharePoint. Critical back-office applications that support online and digital services, which include scanned images for remote readers, run on 110 VMware virtual machines (VMs) hosted on 40 on-premises servers.

“Without access to data and our information systems, the Library couldn’t function,” said Alastair Sommerville, IT Infrastructure Manager at the National Library of Scotland. “In addition, our collections never stop growing. As a legal deposit library, we acquire and digitize thousands of new publications, books and films each week, generating terabytes of data every day!”

In the past, the Library backed up its VMs with four different tools from two different vendors, and each tool was managed independently. Backups were written directly to tape servers located in Edinburgh and Glasgow data centers.

“Creating full backups put a significant strain on our network capacity,” said Sommerville. “Because the process took so long and was so resource- intensive, we were unable to back up our systems as frequently as we wanted to, which increased the risk of data loss in the event of a disaster recovery situation. One of my colleagues spent almost every working day monitoring and troubleshooting the environment.”

With the threat of ransomware attacks on the rise, the Library aimed to strengthen its data protection capabilities. “We decided to invest in a best-of-breed backup and recovery architecture that would offer greater protection to the Library and its users,” said Sommerville.

The National Library of Scotland selected Veeam as its unified data protection solution for both front-end Microsoft 365 applications and back-office digital infrastructure.

“We were confident that Veeam would enable us to protect and restore data within our service-level objectives,” said Sommerville. “Today, we use it to back up 370TB of data.”

Working with Veeam, the Library configured its new solution to perform full weekly and daily incremental backups of all 110 VMs, as well as other departmental systems running Microsoft SQL Server. Data is backed up to Tier 1 and Tier 2 disk storage and deployed at geographically separate data centers, ensuring that backups are always available, even if one site suffers an outage.

“Veeam makes our backup and recovery process so streamlined and automated that we’ve effectively freed up 1.5 days of resource each week in the IT department,” said Sommerville. “In addition, Veeam compression and incremental backup technology has eliminated network bandwidth issues, enabling us to back up data more frequently.”

Building on its success with the VM environment, the Library deployed Veeam to back up its Microsoft 365 data. In this case, to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“Configuring AWS backups using Veeam was very straightforward,” said Sommerville. “The skills we’d gained working with Veeam on-premises made it easy to use Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, since the user interface is almost identical. Using AWS templates, we got up and running in the cloud quickly, and we now back up around 9.5TB of Microsoft 365 data to Amazon S3 buckets.”

Since deploying the Veeam solution, the National Library of Scotland has reduced its operational costs while enhancing the protection of critical data.

“With Veeam, we have significantly improved our RPO for the VMs from 14 days to just 24 hours; we reduced the RPO for the SQL server transaction logs to just 60 minutes,” said Sommerville. “Similarly, we have cut our RTO from three hours to just 10 minutes. Overall, we have improved our RPO by 93% and our RTO by 95%, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with Veeam.”

As part of a strategic plan for digital transformation, the National Library of Scotland is migrating the VMs from on-premises servers to cloud solutions. While this reduces the risk of server failure, the threat posed by cyberattacks continues to rise.

“With ransomware, it’s about when you’ll get hit, rather than if,” said Sommerville. “Thanks to Veeam, we’re better prepared than ever. We can now recover vital servers from immutable backups in minutes. I sleep easier at night knowing we’ve got Veeam on the case. As we continue our journey to cloud, we’re looking forward to working with Veeam to further strengthen our data protection capabilities, helping us keep the National Library of Scotland’s collections safe and available to all.”

• Cut the risk of disruption and loss by introducing immutable backups, which preserve and protect original data. 
  Thanks to the speed and automation of Veeam, we can create daily incremental backups of all our data and a full incremental backup every week for the first time,” said Sommerville. “This helps us ensure back- office and public-facing services are always available.”
• Reduced RPO by 93% and RTO by 95%. 
  Thanks to Veeam, the National Library of Scotland has bolstered its cybersecurity strategy significantly, with 100% data protection and minimal data loss in the event of a disaster.
• Saved 10 hours per week by automating backup management, freeing the IT team up to focus on supporting the Library’s cloud strategy. 
  Veeam just works, which means we no longer need to devote a whole FTE to monitoring and restarting backup jobs,” said Sommerville. “In effect, we’ve gained an extra IT resource, allowing us to focus more time on areas such as our journey to cloud.”