Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

Customer: The TIMKEN Company

Industry: Engineered Bearings, Mechanical Power Transmission Products, Industrial Services

Solution: Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

At the European level, Timken‘s IT infrastructure is concentrated in Colmar, France, and Ploiesti, Romania and offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for 20 production sites and 48 sales offices throughout Europe. In order to meet the requirements of its disaster recovery (DR) plan, which includes aggressive recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO), Timken’s IT team had to find a reliable replication strategy for its Virtual Machines (VM).

“Our objective is to ensure recovery within an hour, and it’s mandatory to meet that requirement,” said Cristian Bardas, IT Infrastructure Manager Europe. “We use Veeam and Microsoft Azure in our data centers because we need a solution that could leverage our existing technologies.”

The Timken IT team remotely operates several data centers worldwide. Timken had already been using Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR), and adopted Microsoft Azure to support offsite backup and cloud-based disaster recovery at the various Timken sites. This allows the VMs to be replicated without having to incur the costs and deal with the complexity of building and maintaining an offsite infrastructure. Timken also decided to implement Veeam Cloud Connect (VCC), which provides a fully integrated, fast, and secure way to back up, replicate and restore data from the cloud. VCC and Microsoft Azure enable Timken to meet the requirements of its RTPO plan and operate the company’s IT infrastructure cost-effectively.

• RPO and RTO reduced to less than one hour while taking continuously changing requirements at the VM replication level into account
• Cost-effective VM replication, since no additional software is needed to purchase and maintain the VMs; inbound traffic to Microsoft Azure is free of charge; VMs are safely stored in the cloud at a fraction of onsite costs; VMs can be downloaded or restored directly in Microsoft Azure
• IT backup and recovery costs reduced by more than 30 percent while enabling critical DR capabilities
• Guaranteed 24/7/365 availability enables Timken to keep internal operations running smoothly & serve clients efficiently