Sien – A fast, reliable, and flexible storage solution.

Starting point.

SIEN—Service Informatique de l’Entité Neuchâteloise (Neuchâtel IT service)—manages the IT of various customers, such as the Canton of Neuchâtel (over 120 service points), the RPN pedagogic network (portal for compulsory education), the HEP-BEJUNE (pedagogical universities of Bern, Jura and Neuchâtel), regional police for the Cantons of Neuchâtel and Jura, a dozen intra-state customers and the “Guichet unique”—the administrative one-stop shop and the portal for public Neuchâtel institutions with more than 41,000 users.

SIEN has more than 100 employees divided between four departments, works with 1,200 servers including physical virtualisation hosts and virtual servers, and manages more than 10,000 workstations.

Project objectives.

SIEN wanted to find a storage and recovery solution and receive a tool that would both free them up from some tasks and ensure a higher level of security and flexibility. These were the project requirements.

Challenge.

The storage and backup system that SIEN was operating at the beginning of the project was no longer sufficient for its IT team. Backup times were too long, continuity could no longer be ensured in case of emergency, and data was only partially protected. SIEN had therefore asked Bechtle to provide a solution that met their requirements and business needs.

Solution.

Our Bechtle specialists proposed implementing Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise to optimally protect the customer infrastructure and ensure continuity of services in case of emergency.

In order to establish the architecture as well as the required technical aspects for implementing the solution into SIEN’s IT infrastructure, our engineers followed the Bechtle Assessment method for data protection projects.

Firstly, SIEN’s requirements were analysed, before Veeam One was installed and the customer infrastructure assessed. After this audit, our specialists evaluated the information collected and took an inventory, based on which the complete data protection architecture could be defined.

After deployment of the Veeam solution across SIEN’s complete infrastructure, our specialists trained the 17 strong SIEN Neuchâtel IT services in Veeam solutions to enable them to manage the new backup and recovery solutions independently.

Business benefits.

“By implementing this project, we were able to simplify our backup and recovery management. We now have a central tool that lets us manage all of our backups, which is far more practical. This solution fully fulfilled our expectations in terms of recovery. We still had to create protocols so that our team could understand how to manage this solution and ensure follow up,” Andrea Rizzo, Head of Back Office System and Production, tells us.

“Even though the solution is putting a lot of strain on our NetApp storage arrays, we can now say with confidence  that our new backups for the virtual environment are quicker and more reliable thanks to the Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise for VMware and Hyper-V. The fact that we are able to do more restores is a big bonus. Recovery is far more flexible, both for entire or partial VMS or simply just for one file,” emphasises Andrea Rizzo.

Partner.