Swisscom Backup and Data Recovery Support

“Fantastic support!” Swisscom IT Services

Download the Swisscom presentation: “Protecting a SAP Cloud with Bacula at Swisscom IT Services” by Stefan Dunsch

Swisscom IT Services is one of Switzerland’s leading IT service providers. Its core business encompasses the realisation of large IT projects (including consultancy and the implementation of new systems), the management of complex IT infrastructures, end-user services and service desk services. Together with its subsidiaries Comit and Sourcag, Swisscom IT Services is the leading provider of consultancy services, implementation and operation of total banking solutions, including peripheral systems, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) for the Swiss financial sector. Thanks to its takeover of the SAP specialist firm Resource, Swisscom IT Services can offer its clients the full range of services from SAP consultancy and SAP industry solutions through to SAP operation.

Swisscom IT Services Group – Facts & Figures

Headquartered in Bern, Switzerland
2009: CHF 841 million/ CHF 435 million*
Q2/2010: CHF 240 million* (+30.4% compared to previous year)

300 customers
16 additional Swiss locations
3,300 employees

Swisscom IT Services’ Core businesses:

Large-scale IT projects
IT infrastructure management

SAP consulting, solutions and operation
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

The Challenge

2 locations
8 petabytes of storage capacity

10,000 servers
2 main frames with about 5,000 MIPS

Swisscom IT Services’ core competencies revolve around management of complex IT infrastructure, SAP, BPO for the financial sector, and end user services. Swisscom IT Services built a “Private Cloud“ based on a HP Blade Matrix infrastructure. This Private Cloud:

Provides template-based services to several customers
Has a focus solely on SAP Services

Has only standardized offers
Has a Pay-Per-Use model (based on performance and storage)

HP Blade Matrix is only the base for deployments, Swisscom IT Services Group further added:

A hypervisor
A backup software

A monitoring and reporting tool
A change management tool

Swisscom’s requirements for the backup software were:

Windows and Linux client support
Virtual and physical servers
Highly scalable
Integration with Nagios available

Easily adaptable
Simple license model
Disaster recovery
Database integration possible (pre-and post-tasks)

The results. Today Swisscom IT Services Group backs up more or less daily:

Hundreds of Linux and Windows File systems
Very large database Log files
Databases in size of 100 to 400 GB each

3 types of Operating Systems
5 different databases servers (MySQL, DB2, MaxDB, Oracle and MS SQL)
2 major SAP installation types (ABAP and JAVA), and many other different SAP products

The benefits to Swisscom IT Services Group as a result of using Bacula:

No license costs involved
No vendor lock-in
Easily adaptable
Well documented

Enterprise-class support
Knowledge available
also offers backup-to-disk
Provides for Disaster Recovery by replication to another location

Conclusion:
Swisscom IT Services Group’s overall experience with Bacula Systems:

Very stable environment
Best performance achievable
Client directly integrated into the templates

Easily adaptable to database backups
“Fantastic support!”

Modules and Tools Adopted: