DB Systel UK is a division of major European rail company Deutsche Bahn, which provides managed IT, cloud solutions, and backup services. Its primary goal is to ensure its customers can meet their objectives — ensuring trains are dispatched and run on time.
The scale of the backup and reporting process was large. There were thousands of routes to report on and DB Systel needed confidence in its ability to back up data on over 1,500 volumes across 700 servers as the business adopted a cloud-first strategy.
Without automated cloud-based backup and recovery, DB Systel UK’s customers would be at risk of downtime and data loss, potentially impacting customer trust. “If our rail customers are unable to run their applications, they are unable to dispatch trains, and if they cannot dispatch trains, they will incur huge losses very quickly,” says Leanne Robinson, Principal Account Manager of DB Systel UK.
The decision to use N2W
DB Systel UK had been using manual scripts for backup and knew that this process wouldn’t scale for its large, complex, and dynamic environment. The company turned to the cloud-native solution offered by N2W from AWS Marketplace.
N2W provides backup and disaster recovery (DR), engineered to handle petabytes of data—without scripting. It also provides the ability to restore a single file or entire workload in a few clicks. And it achieves application-consistency without taking systems offline, which was a critical factor for DB Systel. N2W gives DB Systel UK confidence that data across hundreds of servers is protected and retrievable.
Now that auditing, reporting, and backup compliance objectives are met, DB Systel UK’s IT team has more time to focus on higher-value tasks. “As an organization, we want to focus on innovation and, if our time is taken designing and developing a solution ourselves, we’re taking time away from innovation for our customers,” says Leanne Robinson.
N2W: purpose-built for cloud
N2W leverages snapshot technology to provide enterprise-class backup for production workloads. For example, DB Systel UK can cycle Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots into Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) buckets. This keeps automated records at specific moments in time to allow users to retrieve data from the important moments before a crash.
This process happens automatically, at scale, and N2W can store data efficiently in flexible tiers to fit their specific needs. It’s flexibility allows for durable, secure solutions for storage service, data transfer, and networking options to meet needs at any size or scale.
“The reality is that anything that requires human effort is subject to human error,” says Stuart Lupton, Cloud Architect at DB Systel UK. “No matter how conscientious our staff are, there will always be those human errors.” N2W provides the automated solution the company needs to reduce the risks associated with manually backing up hundreds of servers across multiple accounts.
The benefits for DB Systel UK
“With N2W and our approach to tagging we can give our customers 100% confidence that every one of their servers is backed up.” —Stuart Lupton, Cloud Architect
DB Systel UK has saved near 20% of operational time just by switching from manual scripting to N2W. These time savings can be attributed to the ease at which N2WS allows DB Systel UK to manage backups, data retention, recovery, and reporting. It currently takes over 20,000 snapshots and protects over half a PB of data.
The cost-effective storage tiering available with N2W also helps DB Systel UK meet European compliance regulations: Now DB Systel UK can retain backup data for more than seven years—ultimately helping its own customers stay in compliance and avoid fines.
