BVB simplifies and standardizes Backup for Xenserver platform by Vinchin

Data is the key for our business, so we’ve been using backup solution to protect our datacenter. Since initial the scale of business is small, everything went smoothly. But as the scale gets bigger, we discovered that we couldn't manage these data effectively and flexibly with current solution as before, but this headache problem was finally solved after finding Vinchin!

Kniess Olaf, IT department Supervisor

BVB

Business Challenge

Basler Verkehrs-Betriebe (BVB) founded in 1895, is a public transport operator in the Swiss city of Basel, and is wholly owned by canton of Basel-Stadt, which consists of city of Basel and the municipalities of Bettingen and Riehen. BVB became a self-governing public corporation on 1 January 2006.

BVB transports nearly 128 million passengers annually. That is more than 350,000 people every day. 85 trams circulate along nine tramlines, and 88 buses operate on 14 bus routes. Over 1,200 BVB employees ensure the smooth running of BVB’s services 365 days a year. “I was looking for an effective backup solution for my company as we have a quite complicated IT system running heavily every day, the last backup solution required us to install an agent in each virtual machine on our XenServer platform to perform backup and restore. Of course, a small number is acceptable, but when the number of virtual machines increases, it bring us troubles on workload.” Says Kniess.

On top of that, IT staff productivity is built on how easy-to-use and flexible backup software is. “It is well-known that time is money, but our employees have to spend double or even several times on operating backup and recovery jobs. If the result of spending so much time is that the security of data can be increased by the same multiple, then I will be happy to do it, but obviously not. ” Says Kniess.

Vinchin Solution

“We deployed Vinchin Backup & Recovery to our Xenserver environment with an attempt mentality, what I didn’t expect was that the installation process only took me a few minutes to complete because I don’t need to install agents on each VM. Not only these, considering in our growing environment, we focused on testing “Backup Node Expansion” feature and then found that we can back up multiple XenServer clusters and split those data to our several storage devices at the same time. The best part is that all of these nodes are powered by one Vinchin web console, which greatly improves efficiency. Our IT staffs are the happiest people.” Says Kniess.

As Kniess is not the only person who in charge of IT department in BVB , we recommended “Multi-user management” feature to Kniess. “At the suggestion of Vinchin Support, we decided to use this feature for a simple reason, everyone’s permissions to the backup system are different. Only the specified staff has the permission to access the system through administrator account. Others can access via other user accounts. Besides, different account settings are convenient for our leaders and audit to manage and monitor Jobs. ” Says Kniess.

Result

After moving to the Vinchin Backup & Recovery, BVB has reduced expenditures on DR operations by 50% or more. In addition to the cost reduction, it has actually improved backup and recovery times for critical data. “Vinchin was not our first choice, but the simple, easy-to-use, high-performance backup solution they provided for the XenServer platform finally convinced us to move forward with them!” Says Kniess.