ArcelorMittal Bremen GmbH, a subsidiary of ArcelorMittal – the world’s largest steel company – produces more than 3.6 million tons of crude steel every year. It is also one of the largest employers in Germany’s Bremen region. The company and its steelworks are located on the banks of Weser River in the north of Bremen, where steel has been produced since 1957. It runs a modern and integrated steel mill. All its plants – from pig iron production to sheet metal processing – are located on the same premises, to keep distances short and optimize the production process. The customers are from the automotive, construction, packaging, mechanical engineering, and household appliance industries. It counts Europe’s leading automotive manufacturers among its major clients.
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To ensure continuous steel production, the plants must aim to be always available. This principle of continuous availability extends to its information technology (IT) systems and data. The company’s data must be regularly and reliably stored to support the operation of its production plants.
The IT system from ArcelorMittal Bremen includes a range of Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases for production-related process data; an SAP system; file server data; technical management systems; and a document archive system. They also include data from the coking plant in Bottrop of ArcelorMittal Bremen.
This complex and heterogeneous IT environment has made it vital to have an enterprise-grade solution that is capable of efficiently backing up data across all the company’s systems.
ArcelorMittal Bremen has been using Data Protector as its centralized and largely automated backup solution for more than 20 years. The company’s backup environment is managed by an external IT service provider and ArcelorMittal Bremen uses another provider for related support and in-depth technical expertise.
For data backup, ArcelorMittal Bremen uses the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) EML 103 with HP LTO-4 Ultrium tape drives and the HPE StoreOnce 6500 deduplication appliance.
ArcelorMittal Bremen uses also the HPE MSL4048 with HPE LTO-6 Ultrium tape drives as a physically separate redundant system, which holds images from HP EML 103 and HPE StoreOnce 6500.
The company’s large databases are backed up onto the tape libraries. The smaller databases, file servers, and process computers are backed up on StoreOnce 6500. This system is used very efficiently, with an average compression ratio of 9:1.
ArcelorMittal Bremen’s overall data volume is in the low three-digit terabyte range and growing rapidly – by about 15 percent every year – due to the need to retain an increasing range of business data. This includes technical documentation, accounting and customer data, and most importantly, quality-related plant measurement figures.
According to Henning Wesemann, the company’s IT expert and project manager responsible for centralized data backup and storage solutions, Data Protector has proven its value to ArcelorMittal Bremen. “Data Protector has always won against its competitors due to the combination of all its features,” he says.
Solutions that combine efficiency and security have become indispensable for backup and restore processes to meet the needs of companies with complex IT environments, Wesemann adds. “This is where Data Protector comes into its own.”
With Data Protector, ArcelorMittal Bremen has been able to back up its data regularly according to the requirements of each of the company’s specialist departments. It has also been able to manage a strategy covering full incremental backups, retention periods, and backup times.
More importantly, Data Protector has allowed ArcelorMittal Bremen to back up data from different sources and environments. These include about 400 physical and 90 logical partitions in its IBM AIX environment and 570 virtual machines in its VMware environment as well as 120 databases.
As a result, ArcelorMittal Bremen has been able to seamlessly blend the virtual and physical worlds in a shared backup console. Using Data Protector solutions has also supported the company in its strategy to standardize data and make it highly available.
