InfraServ Wiesbaden Picks Cohesity and AWS for Faster Recovery, Lower Costs, and Scalability

Service provider InfraServ Wiesbaden changed from a legacy, tape-based backup solution to AWS Partner Cohesity’s backup as a service (BaaS) solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move saved the company 30 hours of manual tasks per month and delivered more granular file restoration in seconds, not hours. InfraServ Wiesbaden provides services to tenants of Kalle-Albert industrial park in Wiesbaden, Germany. The solution is hosted by Cohesity on AWS and uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

InfraServ Wiesbaden provides services for businesses located on Kalle-Albert industrial park in Wiesbaden, Germany. It offers backup as a service (BaaS) but this was based on legacy tape technology and required three data centers for production, disaster recovery, and backup environments. It also required staff to physically take tapes to an offsite storage facility—and on occasions—go and retrieve them to restore systems. 

The process absorbed up to 30 hours of time in manual tasks per month. In addition, the on-premises hardware was reaching end of life and was increasingly expensive to maintain. Increasing capacity was a slow and manual process that delayed the onboarding of new services or workloads.

InfraServ Wiesbaden’s real challenge was that it struggled to adequately back up Microsoft 365 files, which its users increasingly required. Granular restoration of Microsoft 365 files, especially Microsoft Teams data, is difficult because its data and files come from a variety of sources. Users also wanted backups that would work across their on-premises and cloud workloads with minimal need for management or oversight.

InfraServ Wiesbaden looked at a variety of solutions to its backup challenges before deciding to work with AWS Partner Cohesity. Cohesity’s backup as a service (BaaS) on AWS was the only solution that offered a single platform to satisfy all its requirements, while needing minimal oversight or management. The service is managed by Cohesity and hosted on AWS. 

The two companies worked closely together to provide the right solution. “Cohesity has been a true partner,” says Steffen Maurer, Head of IT Operations & IT Infrastructure at InfraServ Wiesbaden. “We needed someone we could look in the eye when there was a problem—not deal with through a call center. They’ve been there when we needed them but also proactively warned us about upcoming issues like malware.” 

Cohesity BaaS offers hybrid cloud flexibility with connectors to on-premises workloads and backs up cloud workloads through direct, read-only access. Each snapshot is replicated three times and stored in the AWS data center in Frankfurt. Cohesity’s BaaS uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which gives access to reliable, scalable infrastructure on demand, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere.

Once the decision was made to go with Cohesity’s solution on AWS, and backup strategies and processes had been agreed, the team had a pilot system ready for testing in a few days. Optimizing bandwidth and trialing different processes took a little longer. But the team is already saving up to 30 hours a month in staff time and is no longer physically driving tapes to the storage facility. Regular backups used to take all night to complete and full backups typically took a weekend. The Cohesity solution runs in hours and works incrementally so there is no need to run full backups. 

Restoring files is also much easier. “I’d say the difference between old and new is 100 to one,” says Mauer. “The old system meant we had to physically find the old tape or even go to the offsite storage vault and find it there. Now it takes seconds and we can restore files very selectively.” All backed up files are checked for malware and not even the InfraServ team can delete files less than 4 weeks old. 

The team can constantly monitor files and systems and quickly perform restoration if needed while Cohesity has responsibility for the integrity of the backups. The system handles about 100 TB of on-premises data but can scale almost instantly as required.

The company is still in the process of closing down its on-premises systems, which will provide a further cost saving. But it is already saving the team a great deal of time previously spent on manual tasks.

Migrating to AWS has also opened up access to other services. InfraServ Wiesbaden is talking to Cohesity about a more comprehensive disaster recovery system and what kind of emergency infrastructure would be required to restore systems from AWS in the event of a serious incident.

But saving money was never the main driver for this project. “We’ve got rid of a ton of technical debt,” says Mauer. “The project itself was so straightforward. It’s not just saving us time and money, we now have faster, better backups for customers—it just doesn’t compare to what we had before.”