540 million people and counting: Dedalus supports life-saving care around the globe with zero data loss from Veeam

In a healthcare setting, every second counts. Often, the sooner a patient is diagnosed, the better the outcome. Software provider Dedalus, which creates solutions responsible for billions of diagnostic test results each year, understands the importance of high availability when supporting healthcare delivery.

“Our aim is to add value across the health and social care ecosystem,” said Thorsten Schwarz, Global Team Lead & Senior Solution Architect — Backup/ Restore at Dedalus. “Our solutions enable a unique flow of information to help ensure that every person involved, from patient to clinician, has a positive experience. To develop and support high-availability software, we need access to our own data 24/7.”

It’s an exciting time at Dedalus, which has been growing fast in recent years through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Inevitably, the group’s expansion is causing the IT team some headaches, as they grapple with inherited applications, backup and recovery policies and more.

“Over time, the Dedalus group has grown to about 75 companies based in many different countries and geographies,” said Schwarz. “We wanted a centralized data protection solution that could cope with anything we threw at it. There was a lot to consider: supporting healthcare means we can’t compromise on reliability. Then there’s the regulations we must comply with on top of that.”

To support its growth strategy and faster responses to customer requests, Dedalus chose the Veeam Data Platform. The goal was to create a centralized data backup and recovery solution for the company’s global operations. Dedalus quickly established a close relationship with Veeam.

“Veeam offers the most easy-to-manage, comprehensive solutions for globally distributed and virtualized VMware vSphere data centers such as ours,” said Schwarz. “I’ve worked with many different backup solutions in the past, and Veeam is the only one that has been designed from the ground up with virtual environments in mind. We’ve been really impressed by the collaboration with Veeam — in particular, the Veeam Technical Account Manager and Customer Success Manager.”

Straight away, the Dedalus IT team got to work rolling out Veeam to protect the company’s large and diverse IT environment. This includes 5,000 virtual servers running Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL database software hosted on 200 physical machines. Next, the team used built-in data deduplication and compression features to drive up efficiency.

“Overall, the data volume of our virtual environment is approximately 1.5PB,” said Schwarz. “Scalability is key for us; we’re already working to move another 6,500 systems and 850TB of data into our central infrastructure, and who knows when the next acquisition will send this number soaring. With Veeam, we’re ready.”

For its most critical systems such as Oracle APEX, Dedalus relies on Veeam’s continuous data protection (CDP) feature. By maximizing business continuity with Veeam, the company is rising to the challenge of supporting the healthcare sector.

“When people’s lives hang in the balance, data loss for even a few seconds is unacceptable,” said Schwarz. “Our employees must be able to access key applications to always support our healthcare clients — and Veeam helps us achieve this.”

Dedalus uses Veeam to safeguard and move data across three distributed sites through a single point of control. With a fast-evolving business to support, the IT team frequently adapts data backup and recovery policies to keep pace with changing demands.

“For regulatory and compliance reasons, we need to keep some of our data in certain regions,” said Schwarz. “With Veeam, we manage this painlessly with a small and agile team. Veeam really came into its own when we moved a key evaluation and test system for our French business. Usually, it would have taken a full week. With Veeam, we used replica seeding and migrated the 10TB system in two days with zero service interruption for users — an outstanding result.”

As Dedalus grows its cloud footprint, Veeam is proving invaluable. Today, the company is protecting Microsoft Azure Active Directory data and over 570TB of data with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.

“Our IT environment looks very different to a few years ago,” said Schwarz. “But with Veeam, it doesn’t matter where our data is located, we enjoy the same exceptional level of protection. We can also scale up our backup and recovery environment with ease to cover any new acquisitions or demands. Veeam frees up time for us to analyze business needs and adjust our strategy accordingly, including tailoring backup measures to suit different departments’ requirements. Additionally, we can better protect our operations against new threats.”

Dedalus is now exploring the possibility of offering its solutions through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. If it does, the company plans to include backup services enabled by Veeam.

“We could be on the cusp of a big shift in our business model,” said Schwarz. “Whatever happens, Veeam will come with us on the journey, as it gives us full confidence in our ability to protect our customers’ data round the clock.”

• Removed barriers to expansion for Dedalus by enabling fast, easy integration of new systems into the company’s backup and restore environment. 
  Using Veeam, we’re able to easily integrate new acquisitions into our central backup processes,” says Schwarz. “We can add any system quickly, no matter whether it runs on-premises in a local data center or in the cloud.”
• Reduced backup administration by 60% and boosted IT team productivity.
  Veeam provides high performance and reliability combined with easy management, enabling Dedalus to support global operations with a small distributed team.
• Drives down risk of data loss to zero, even when moving data between platforms.
  Veeam really came into its own when we moved a key evaluation and test system for our French business,” said Schwarz. “Usually, it would have taken a full week. With Veeam, we used replica seeding and migrated the 10TB system in two days with zero service interruption for users — an outstanding result.”