Sky Deutschland protects programming and customer care with Veeam

The Business Challenges

Sky Deutschland is one of the most innovative media enterprises in Germany and a driving force for new digital TV technologies. Sky customers can choose from an exclusive offering of high-quality programs and decide when, where and on what device they watch them.

Customers are Sky’s sole focus. In addition to inspiring them with the finest programming, Sky is committed to providing them with the finest customer service. The data, applications and network-attached storage (NAS) that support programming and customer service must be protected and available every minute of every day.

“Our challenge was legacy backup,” said Anis Smajlovic, Senior Manager, Solution Architecture at Sky Deutschland. “We used two solutions — one to back up our virtual servers and one to back up our physical servers — but both solutions were outdated, complex and difficult to use.”

Smajlovic said even the simplest tasks were time consuming, such as recovering a file from a backup of the customer relationship management (CRM) system. The system must be available around the clock because it supports customer engagement and retention, which help eliminate churn.

“We spent too much time managing data protection, so we searched for a modern solution that is simple, affordable, flexible and scalable,” Smajlovic said. “Flexibility and scalability are particularly important because we anticipate having a hybrid-cloud infrastructure in the future, and we know our data will grow to one petabyte or more. Our goal was to find an affordable solution that would grow with us and enable us to back up anything to anywhere, and we found that in Veeam.”

The Veeam Solution

Sky Deutschland replaced legacy backup with Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam provides scalable, modern data protection to assure availability across any app, workload and cloud, and it offers flexible, universal licensing to back up anything to anywhere. Veeam is also easy to use, saving 40 hours each week in backup management time, and Veeam is 50% less expensive than the legacy solutions.

“Knowing that the data, applications and NAS workloads supporting 24-hour programming and customer care are always protected is the biggest benefit of using Veeam,” Smajlovic said. “The fact that I can move Veeam licenses around to protect different workloads as our IT environment changes is another big benefit. This level of flexibility combined with the breadth of what Veeam protects is a very powerful combination.”

Veeam backs up hundreds of terabytes on-premises to ExaGrid, which replicates off-premises for disaster recovery. Veeam is designed to back up petabytes of data, so Sky’s IT team doesn’t worry about scalability as data grows. The team doesn’t worry about flexibility either. When Sky moves to a hybrid-cloud IT infrastructure, Veeam’s Universal License will protect any workload.

“One of the largest workloads Veeam currently protects is NAS, and we’re very grateful,” Smajlovic said. “When we lost several mainly Office documents and images that were critically important to the user, Veeam recovered them quickly and easily, saving the day and my life.” Managing NAS backup is easy too. Like any Veeam backup, NAS backup has a Scale-out Backup Repository. As backup data grows and the repository reaches its storage limit, Sky can add any storage because Veeam is storage neutral. For Sky that might include additional ExaGrid appliances and cloud storage.

“What I really like about Scale-out Backup Repository is being able to tier data to affordable, long-term cloud-object storage,” Smajlovic. “I appreciate that Veeam will help us archive backups and save money.”

That savings is in addition to the money Veeam saves the company because it was half the price of legacy backup. Smajlovic said Veeam is also simple to use, saving 40 hours each week.

“Everything about Veeam is pretty easy to understand, but if we have questions, we check documentation — an excellent resource that is underrated,” Smajlovic said. “In the last few years Veeam has really ramped up features and functionality for enterprise organizations like ours. We’re looking forward to trying Instant NAS Recovery, and we’re looking into Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform. Veeam has a great roadmap — that’s another reason it’s a leader among competitors.”

The Results

• Delivers modern data protection to assure availability across any app and cloud
  “I know I can use Veeam to back up anything — from legacy applications to cloud-native applications, and I can back them up anywhere,” Smajlovic said.
• Provides flexible and universal licensing to back up any workload to anywhere
  Veeam’s Universal License is a portable solution for protecting workloads on premises and in the cloud. It uses a simple consumption model and is workload-, hardware- and cloud-neutral.
• Saves 40 hours each week and costs 50% less than the legacy solutions
  “Veeam is more affordable than competitors and easier to manage,” Smajlovic said. “Veeam’s product maturity is impressive too.”