BayWa r.e. Opts for Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that BayWa r.e. renewable energy GmbH, a subsidiary of BayWa AG, chose its solution to achieve data availability at all levels, from the data center to the cloud.

Data and applications needed for developing and operating solar, wind and bio-energy plants are reliably backed up and can be restored within minutes in the event of a failure

Moreover, the solution facilitates the adoption of cloud services like Office 365 for BayWa r.e.’s workforce. The energy company retains control over the data stored in the cloud and eliminates risks caused by the accidental deletion of e-mails or documents.

BayWa r.e. is a developer, service provider, wholesaler and supplier of energy solutions in the field of renewable energies. The company is represented with locations in Europe, North America, AsiaPac region and invests in new and emerging markets. With 2,400 employees worldwide, it generated annual revenues of almost €2 billion in 2019.

It. relies on a hybrid IT strategy to support its diverse business activities in the best possible way. The company continues to operate many business-critical systems on-premise, but also uses cloud services such as Microsoft Office 365 for collaboration in connected teams. It was therefore looking for a platform to manage and protect data across all environments.

“Our global development teams need reliable access to applications and data from any location in order to be able to implement innovative projects on schedule,” says Florian Sutter, system administrator, BayWa r.e. “At the same time, our operative business also depends enormously on IT availability. As a service provider, BayWa r.e. is responsible for the technical and commercial management of renewable energy plants with a total output of more than eight gigawatts. IT systems which, for instance, record the operating data of the plants around the world must be available around the clock.“

BayWa r.e. had already decided to use Veeam technology when setting up its virtual server infrastructure several years ago. With Veeam Backup & Replication all VMs of the vSphere environment – including productive databases and Exchange servers – were protected and delivered with HA from the very beginning.

The Veeam solution enables us to restart failed VMs within minutes,”  says Sutter. “In addition, the recoverability of the backed-up resources is constantly monitored. This makes it much easier for us to achieve the required level of availability for our global business.“

The energy company also relied on Veeam technology for the next transformation step of its IT. When BayWa r.e. moved to Office 365, it also implemented Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 – initially mainly to protect e-mail communication and regularly backup Exchange Online data on its own systems. In this way, individual e-mails or even entire mailboxes and archives can be restored at any time.

“In one case, this involved recourse claims from a project several years ago,” says Sutter. “The communication for this was no longer accessible in the Office 365 archive. Thanks to Veeam, we were able to completely restore the relevant e-mails, document the facts correctly and thus avert potential economic damage amounting to millions.“

In addition to Exchange Online data, BayWa r.e. also uses the Veeam solution to backup all data stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams. Especially the SharePoint environments play a key role for the internal knowledge management and the joint processing of documents.

BayWa r.e. replaced many local SharePoint installations and file servers in recent years and migrated the content to SharePoint Online.

“The reliable backup solution has made this migration much easier,” confirms Sutter. “All locations can rest assured that the switch to the cloud poses no risk to the information stored in SharePoint. Over the past few months, we have had repeated requests to restore individual documents or even complete sites to SharePoint Online. With Veeam, it has always worked seamlessly.“

Currently, IT managers are already planning the next steps with Veeam. In the course of the ongoing digitalization, BayWa r.e. also wants to transfer more workloads to Azure in the future.

“We are therefore evaluating the possible use of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure“, says Sutter. “There is a very strong case for also backing up Azure workloads with Veeam in the future, thus protecting all our data and applications following consistent standards.”

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