Nordex simplifies data management and reduces backup times by 50%

The Challenge

Renewable energies are contributing to the power supply in Germany and worldwide with an increasing share. As a result, data is becoming increasingly important—even in the manufacture of wind turbines. Accordingly, the accumulating information must be stored reliably and comprehensively. In order to meet tight response times that this industry demands, Nordex needed to resolve the difficulties that came with having an overly complex architecture, distributed data across several locations, and the need to back up large volumes of data. Data was stored by an external service provider on tape for archiving. Restoring the data was only possible with a long lead time—and also only from an entire volume, sometimes several terabytes, not specifically from individual files. In addition, the few physical rack-mounted servers still in use were not backed up at all.

Both the company’s own IT department and external auditors pointed areas to improve in the course of the ISO 27001 certification. Therefore, Nordex decided to introduce a comprehensive backup and restore solution to bring it up to date. To do so, the company reviewed solutions from various vendors and conducted Proofs of Concepts (PoCs) with three platforms. “Cohesity convinced us with its superior user interface as well as its clear, intuitive operation,” explains Oliver Koop, Head of Corporate IT Systems Management at Nordex SE. “At the same time, all systems could be secured from a single pane of glass. Now, mutual geo-redundancy for data mirroring and backup of more than one billion files is provided through various servers in each of the central data centres of the company.”

The Solution

As early as the PoC, Cohesity and IT partner SVA deployed HPE hardware, which was later used and expanded for live operations. The overall original source data has been reduced by around half on Cohesity. This capacity reduction cuts backup time in half. For some SQL server workloads, the data volume is even reduced by a ratio of 100:1, and for VMware up to 60:1. In addition, since only the file changes are transferred, low bandwidths are sufficient for data replication between sites despite the long distance between the different data centres.

Nordex now consolidates backups, file and object shares for development, and testing and analysis on Cohesity’s web-scale data management platform. Through the use of zero-cost clones, Nordex for the first time has its own test data environment in a segregated area for IT developers. This is becoming increasingly important as Nordex focuses more and more on the further development of its IT systems and has outsourced day-to-day operations to the service provider Mindtree.

Cohesity DataProtect provides comprehensive protection for all data sources on one platform, which is particularly useful in defending against ransomware as it can be used for immediate, scalable data recovery in any environment.

The Results

“With Cohesity, we can now back up volumes according to different guidelines and in subsets,” says Oliver Koop. “In doing so, individual files can be found specifically, for example, in accordance with GDPR requirements. This gives us significantly more flexibility. During backup operations, only the changes to the files are backed up and replicated. This significantly reduces the time required for backup and transfer. We also benefit from daily reports: this allows us to quickly check when the last backup ran and whether it worked correctly.”

Due to Cohesity’s intuitive and easy-to-use interface, data management has become much easier. The solution works smoothly and has significantly reduced the risk of data loss. In addition, its modular design allows it to be expanded step-by-step with new functions, scaled to Nordex’s 110 worldwide locations and customised for each region.

“Cohesity has brought us up-to-date in terms of backup and restore,” sums up Oliver Koop. “At the same time, we are equipped for future tasks. We will also leverage Cohesity to back up other systems such as SAP HANA in Azure, as well as Exchange Online mailboxes or Microsoft 365 applications including SharePoint and Teams. Other applications such as data analysis, disaster recovery, Backup as a Service, and the migration of file services to the Cohesity platform are also possible moving forward. Here, we benefit from the very fast ticket processing and the excellent cooperation directly with Cohesity’s experts.”