Backup & Restore - Increasing Storage Capacity and Decreasing Storage Costs in the Cloud

Globalvia Backup & Restore EnglishRui Ribeiro2020-10-16T11:10:55+00:00

Backup & Restore - Increasing storage capacity and decreasing storage costs in the Cloud

Globalvia is a worldwide infrastructure concession management enterprise. Established in 2007, Globalvia manages projects in several countries, specializing in highways and railways concession management.

www.globalvia.com

Challenge

Globalvia was struggling with storage capacity at their main office, which was affecting their ability to perform and extend backups, this was a problem as their cross regions locations with mission critical hardware were required to have backups for long periods of time for compliance purposes.

Aside from the general purpose computing servers, the storage systems “accounted for” a total of 30 TB of storage, used to do backups with 15 days mandatory retention policy, that where reaching its end-of-life and weren't able to keep up with the business growth.

Globalvia remote locations, can have a project for up to 30 years, will have to be resilient to hardware failures, that will inevitably happen, either because of hardware malfunction, natural disasters or human errors.

If these issues weren’t dealt with, Globalvia would fail to be in compliance with regulations.

Why AWS and Magic Beans?

Magic Beans has been a long-time partner for Globalvia operations in Portugal and abroad, providing expertise and knowledge in AWS Cloud solutions, so the choice was clear to continue this successful partnership with Magic Beans and AWS.

Solution

After a deep evaluation of Globalvia infrastructure, Magic Beans decided to extend a platform that was already being used by Globalvia, Veeam. This platform was already in production on-premises, but the installed version didn’t support Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

To surpass this issue, Veeam was updated to version 10, which supports Amazon S3, not only regarding backups, but also as a way to quickly deploy a failed instance in AWS, extending even more their possibilities to recover from disasters.

From the technological point of view this represented an easy and straight approach.

Amazon S3 became an even more mission critical service in that regard, allowing for almost infinite storage, at a fraction of the previous cost, this way solving the capacity problems Globalvia was facing at the time.

Globalvia Backup Architecture

Globalvia Restore Architecture

Results and Benefits

Magic Beans dedicated a lot of time to ensure a seamless integration of this solution for Globalvia and their teams. The Backup team now has much more storage available and at the same time the development team also has Amazon S3 as a service to extend their development and testing of applications.

The implementation of an offsite backup infrastructure would cost Globalvia 18.000 € in hardware, not taking into consideration all other operational requirements. With Amazon S3 that cost was avoided, with the added benefit of obtaining an elastic and reliable solution.

With Magic Beans solution, Globalvia avoided updating the current infrastructure which required a 15.000€ investment for the first 4 years and after that 600€/year regarding the servers and 1000€/year for the storage components.

Another benefit is the reduced Time-to-Market when dealing with ordering, provisioning and setting up hardware components.