Transdev Sverige keeps passengers moving across Sweden as Veeam accelerates backup performance by 90%

The Business Challenge

With an 80-year long history in Sweden, Transdev Sverige provides an essential service: helping the country’s citizens travel safely, cost-effectively and sustainably.

“We connect people and businesses across Sweden,” said Åke Redin, Server Manager at Transdev Sverige. “Many customers rely on real-time information online and through apps to plan journeys and keep moving throughout their busy schedules.”

To reliably deliver public transport data to customers’ fingertips and to information displays at bus stops and train stations, Transdev Sverige needed to optimize its IT services. Specifically, the organization was looking to increase staff productivity and accelerate backups to help maximize service continuity.

“We are always striving to improve our services,” said Redin. “Data is only becoming more important in our industry. The increasing number of systems in data centers and IoT devices at the edge must be protected. We wanted to future-proof our operations with a modern, effective and cost-efficient data backup and recovery solution to ensure we were prepared for everything — even the unexpected.” 

The Veeam Solution

In the past, Transdev Sverige used Arcserve, Symantec Backup Exec and Micro Focus Data Protector, and reached out to a long-time partner, Egloo System AB, to modernize and transform its backup solution.

“The highly-qualified Egloo team of vendor-certified engineers analyzed our business needs and suggested Veeam Backup & Replication in combination with server and network upgrades to accelerate our backups,” said Redin. “Egloo and Veeam did a proof of concept that demonstrated much faster backups and simplified management. By the end, we were convinced that Veeam indeed was the right solution for us.”

Together, Transdev Sverige, Veeam and Egloo deployed a complete solution with Veeam Backup & Replication on HPE Proliant servers with HPE 3PAR 8200 storage across two data centers to maximize business resiliency. To streamline backup processes, Transdev Sverige replaced its existing tape backups with a disk-based HPE StoreOnce system.

“The combination of HPE and Veeam is very reliable and works very well for us,” said Redin.

With help from Egloo, Transdev Sverige adopted the Veeam 3-2-1 Rule for optimal data protection, with three copies of business data stored on two different media, at different locations. Veeam also integrates with the HPE StoreOnce Catalyst protocol, so Transdev Sverige can accelerate its backup times and reduce storage costs by creating space-efficient backups of 250 virtual machines (VMs) with built-in deduplication functionality. HPE and Veeam’s solution architecture also protects backups from accidental deletion through ransomware or other common cyberthreats.

Using Veeam ONE, Transdev Sverige centralized their monitoring of its systems and backups. The easy and intuitive user interface of Veeam Backup & Replication also allowed Transdev Sverige to simplify backup administration.

“Thanks to Veeam Backup & Replication, we reduced routine administration tasks from about two hours per week to just 15 minutes,” said Redin. “In the past, only a few backup specialists could recover files and data. With Veeam, we eliminated this bottleneck. We are much more flexible; now our service desk can carry out these tasks for our thousands of business users, saving everyone valuable time and effort.” 

“Without needing to locate the right tape and constantly change tapes, we can now handle a complete recovery remotely by using Veeam,” said Redin. “This is a big benefit to the business and helped us achieve something that was impossible before.”

Looking ahead, Transdev Sverige is investigating how it could use the selfservice capabilities of the Veeam solution to further speed up recovery. The organization may also take advantage of built-in cloud replication in the future.

“Working with Veeam, HPE and Egloo, we’ve stepped up our business resilience significantly,” said Redin. “Our backups complete 90% faster with no effect on the rest of our IT infrastructure, which helps us maximize data availability for the hundreds and thousands of people that rely on our transport services each day.”

The results

Accelerated backup performance by 90% with no impact on operations, which enabled exceptional service continuity
Transdev Sverige gained additional layers of protection for essential data without compromising on speed of service to users.

Reduced backup administration by 10%, freeing the IT team to focus on business transformation
“In the past, we estimate that we spent 10% more time on managing backups,” said Redin. “Thanks to Veeam, we can now switch our attention back to developing innovative new mobility solutions for customers.”

Enabled Transdev Sverige to add new systems to backups in just 10 seconds, supporting seamless operations
The organization takes advantage of the close integration between Veeam and VMware vSphere to dynamically adjust backups, helping to accelerate maintenance and updates, improving data protection and IT security.