Long-standing Satisfied Customer GfK Extends DMaaS Backup to Worldwide Business Environment
GfK, Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, is one of the world’s leading companies in the field of data and analysis. For over 85 years, GfK has been providing consumer and market insights.
The company now employs more than 8,000 people in over 50 countries worldwide. As a result, GfK has vast amounts of business-critical consumer and market data to secure around the globe.
A Growing Partnership on a Solid Foundation
In 2013, GfK turned to DMP for technical support for its Commvault environment. Due to the professional manner in which DMP carried out the demanding consulting, GfK then asked DMP to advise them on the worldwide rollout of their Commvault environment. Due to the growing trust in DMP and the
GfK’s focus on its primary IT, DMP began managing the Commvault environment for the EMEA region in 2014.
In 2017, GfK relocated its on-premises IT, operated in Nuremberg, to two Equinix data centers in Frankfurt am Main. At this time, DMP was already offering its pay-per-use based managed backup services in the DataManagement-as-a-Service (DMaaS) product division and was supporting various well-known customers. GfK also commissioned DMP to run its backup completely in the DMP data centers in Frankfurt.
DMaaS Backup as part of the DMaaS portfolio is a fully managed backup service that includes the backup storage hardware, the backup servers, the backup software and support. All management is carried out by DMP and also includes recovery for GfK end users. DMP is integrated into GfK’s ServiceNow environment and receives recovery requests as if DMP were part of GfK.
Most recently, in 2021, GfK extended this remote management service agreement to include other Commvault environments outside the EMEA region. In coordination with GfK, DMP consolidated the existing contract to also cover the environments in the Americas and APAC regions. In addition, the contracting parties have renewed the DMaaS contract for the next five years. “The extended cooperation demonstrates our confidence in DMP as a reliable partner that has been responsible for our backups in recent years
and should continue to do so in the future,” explains Joerg Hesselink, Global Head of Infrastructure at GfK.
Highly Business-Critical Virtualized Data
The GfK EMEA IT environment is operated in the two Equinix data centers in Frankfurt. The environment consists of over 2000 VMs based on VMware, with various MySQL and MS-SQL databases. Since GfK collects all types of consumer and market information, the data is one of the company’s most important assets and is therefore highly business-critical.
The backup includes a data volume of over 1 PB. Of this, the most critical data is stored in the Oracle databases, with approximately 150 TB. Since the Oracle databases contain the core of GfK’s data holdings, the backup is stored at two DMP backup locations. The backup of the archive log files takes place every 15 minutes or every hour simultaneously to the two DMP backup locations. DMP also takes care of the backup of GfK’s cloud-native development environment based on Kubernetes as well as the Microsoft Office 365 backup,
including Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.
DMP recently automated the DR restore test for disaster recovery purposes to ensure that GfK can recover very quickly after a disaster or ransomware attack.
This includes backing up the data in AWS and using AWS as a target for the automated DR process.
Success Story Continues: DMP as a Global Backup Partner
Today, DMP is responsible not only for GfK’s backups in Europe/EMEA, but also in the APAC and Americas regions. The company manages the backups in these two regions, with storage taking place in the DMP data centers in Singapore and the USA, respectively. In addition, DMP has supplied a number of its backup appliances to the various GfK locations worldwide in order to be able to create local backups in countries such as China, Turkey, Australia, etc.
In the long-standing cooperation, DMP has proven to be a trustworthy partner for GfK with its constantly changing, demanding environment. “DMP has shown itself to be flexible in terms of our requirements and the provision of services in our dynamically growing IT environment,” says Hesselink. DMP delivers a near -100 percent success rate in data backup month after month. GfK benefits from a first-class backup and restore environment that is available worldwide and is based on an attractive pay-per-use based DMaaS model. In other words, GfK can expand its business worldwide and DMP delivers the required backup solution with a
Billing per TB, which is based on the actual use of the services. GfK and DMP are certain: The success story can continue.
