Dr. Markus Kiess, Administrative Director of the Gregor Mendel Institute for Molecular Plant Biology GmbH (GMI) in Vienna: "Imagine that your entire server room with all the hardware is destroyed by a catastrophe and our research institute would be unable to act. At this point at the latest, you want to fall back on your backup server room and reuse all IT services in the usual way as soon as possible. But running an entire server room with hardware continuously in an unlikely event is, of course, a high financial burden.

The solution for us was the "Disaster Recovery as  a Service" product of n4b. This not only allowed us to cover a daily backup of all our IT services and data to a professional data center, but also gives us the opportunity to activate all existing local servers in the Azure Cloud. In the event of a total failure of our IT infrastructure, the institute would be able to continue working practically without restriction via this virtual backup server room. And this at a fraction of the cost of a physical server room. "

Challenge

A few years ago, the GMI had to give up the back-up server room in the 12th district. When looking for alternatives and weighing the costs, the decision was made for a virtual mapping of the server room based on the Azure services. Synchronizing the remarkable amount of over half a petabyte of scientific data presented an additional challenge.

Our solution

Together with microsoft's specialists, a virtual network connected via VPN services was established in Azure. On the "On Premise" side, all central IT services were virtualized and all existing virtual machines were migrated from VMWare  to Hyper-V, with additional massive savings in license costs. After that, the backup system was mapped in such a way that a clone of each virtual machine was replicated to Azure every day in order to be able to take over the functions there in the shortest possible time in the event of a failure of one or more server systems.