VDL Groep moves towards 24/7 global manufacturing with service continuity from Veeam

VDL Groep (VDL) has built a thriving manufacturing business by combining craftsmanship, entrepreneurship and high-quality machinery to drive innovation. Over a 69-year history, the group has expanded globally through a combination of organic growth and acquisition. Along the way, the role of technology in the group’s strategy changed dramatically.

“In the past, IT was aimed at a decentralized organization, with decentralized facilitation of applications, services and support,” said Frank Hack, IT manager at VDL. “To improve on the increasing demand of the many organizations in the VDL Group, IT is now centrally organized in terms of management, IT administration and support. Essential to this was overhead reduction caused by having multiple tools and solutions in place. More recently, market pressure to deliver faster and more cost-effectively is leading us towards 24/7 manufacturing operations. For example, we are introducing solutions that will allow customers to order a metal sheet at 3 a.m. and have it machined based on an automatically generated laser template.”

Any unplanned downtime in VDL’s digital systems could bring production lines to a standstill. With data volumes growing rapidly, the company aimed to strengthen protection and ensure round-the-clock availability.

“In the last five years, our data has doubled to almost 1.2PB,” said Bas ten Velden, Systems Architect at VDL. “It’s vital that we protect this data adequately, as it includes the intellectual property of both us and our customers. From technical drawings to maintenance information, we’re often asked to recover data saved a few days or even a few months before. Our previous approach — which depended on multiple backup solutions — was time-consuming and lacked transparency.”

To protect fast-growing data and support its move to 24/7 manufacturing, VDL selected Veeam Backup & Replication. The group worked with Veeam and Veeam partners to implement the solution.

“We chose Veeam because it offers scalability, flexibility and ease of management,” said Frank Hack. “The deployment was a smooth process. We received effective support from Veeam and their partners. We outlined our goals for the solution, and they helped us identify the configuration and features that would help us achieve them.”

VDL relies on Veeam to protect a hybrid cloud environment, which includes approximately 1,200 virtual servers and 240 physical servers, mainly located on-premises. The group now backs up critical data every day.

“Using Veeam, we’ve centralized backup management for the entire group, giving us greater visibility and control of the process,” said Bas ten Velden. “Veeam is both easy to use and widely known. When we add new members to the IT team, they quickly get up to speed with our backup and replication strategy, reducing the amount and time we spend on-boarding them.”

VDL is now adding Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to its environment to enable effective backups of some of its most important business applications. The group relies heavily on Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams.

“We opted for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 over built-in Microsoft data protection tools because it is more powerful and comprehensive,” said Frank Hack. “Our experience with Veeam Backup & Replication gives us confidence this new solution will prove just as reliable and versatile as our existing Veeam solution.”

Using Veeam, VDL can now restore data with far greater ease and speed. Periodically, the group runs test restores of its entire environment, ensuring it can recover fast in the event of a disaster.

“Veeam provides granular restore capabilities that allow us to pinpoint a single email from a day or even years ago,” said Joan School, Systems Administrator at VDL. “Users across the VDL group are now more satisfied by our service, because they are assured that lost data can be recovered simply and quickly when the need arises.” By reducing the administrative burden on the VDL IT team, the Veeam solution frees up time for it to support digital transformation of the group’s manufacturing processes.

“Now that we have Veeam, we spend much less time worrying about data protection,” said Frank Hack. “This gives us extra resources to focus on projects that contribute to the group’s competitive edge.”

• Guarantees near-100% service continuity by facilitating non-stop access to data.
  “With Veeam, our data is accessible 100% of the time, no matter what happens,” said Frank Hack. “This helps us in our transition to 24/7, automation-driven IT delivery while retaining the VDL reputation for exceptional quality.”
• 100% backup success rate enables faster responses to clients.
  Thanks to Veeam, VDL can now restore data from comprehensive backups, helping it to react in an agile way to a variety of client requests.
• Helps protect an ever-increasing 1.2PB of data, supporting the company’s expansion strategy.
  “Our data is growing at an exponential rate,” said Bas ten Velden. “With a centralized data protection strategy powered by Veeam, we know we can scale seamlessly to accommodate new acquisitions or diversification of our portfolio.”