Case Study
Automated backup solution for the private cloud of the Federal Employment Agency
Read more about the solution we were able to implement for Germany's largest service provider in the labor market here.
The customer
The Federal Employment Agency (BA)
The Federal Employment Agency (BA) is the largest service provider in the labor market. As a public corporation with self-administration, it carries out its tasks under its own responsibility within the framework of the law applicable to it. The BA provides a comprehensive range of services for citizens, companies and institutions in the employment and training market.
A nationwide network of agencies and job centers (joint institutions) is available to carry out these tasks. Its employees find jobs and apprenticeships on site and provide advice on vocational training and further education. In addition, the Federal Employment Agency is responsible for measures aimed at creating and maintaining jobs, such as promoting vocational training, further vocational training and the professional integration of people with disabilities. It is also responsible for paying out unemployment, insolvency and child benefits.
It also conducts labor market and occupational research and calculates statistics on the labor market.
The challenge
Self-service for the BApC future platform
" For the BApC future platform, we were looking for a way to integrate the backup into the existing self-service and automatically add new virtual machines to it. Users and customers were also to be given options for managing their backups."
Our solution
A custom middleware was developed to handle the communication between the VMware ARIA (formerly vRealize) orchestrator and the Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) backup environment.
This made it possible to provide users with a selected number of options for managing their backups independently. This includes recording a backup with a predefined selection of backup times, pausing or deleting backups, as well as the option to initiate an additional backup at a self-determined time.
The middleware thus supports the Federal Employment Agency's backup and recovery operations in their daily work, as the entire workflow is automated, from the selection of the appropriate datastore to the automatic creation of backup plans, if required, to the cleaning of the backup data after deleting a machine in the backup.
The various benefits of the solution:
Products used:
Configuration and operation:
How it works
The central component of this solution is the .net-based WebAPI, which handles the communication between Aria Orchestrator and the Arcserve UDP API.
The orchestrator provides the information that a new virtual machine is to be included in the backup or that there is a request for an existing virtual machine. These requirements range from adding a new virtual machine to the backup, pausing or deleting the virtual machine in the backup, to an ad hoc backup or adjusting the backup policy.
Based on several parameters, such as the operating system or the application of the virtual machine, the expected size of the system and the utilization of the datastores (backup storage), the WebAPI determines the optimal storage location for the backup data. This is relevant for an even utilization of the backup infrastructure.
The virtual machine is automatically created in the backup and added to a corresponding backup plan. If a suitable plan does not yet exist, it is created automatically according to the requirement.
Within the workflow for deleting a virtual machine that was assigned to a backup plan, the user has the option of selecting a period of time for which the backup data should be retained after deletion. Once this period has elapsed, this data is automatically cleansed.
Time-controlled services take over important background work to ensure a smooth and efficient process.
The WebAPI and the configuration interface were developed with .net and run in the context of IIS. A web interface is available to the Backup Recovery product team to configure the relevant environment and maintain the relevant data.
After completion of the project Orkan Akcelik, Product Owner Backup Recovery, IaaS, IT system house of BA, praised our work:
"In collaboration with Fujitsu and NWE-IT, the Federal Employment Agency's IT department has succeeded in offering its users and IT customers a comprehensive option for managing their data backups in the BA's self-service private cloud platform. The Backup Recovery product team was thus able to adequately meet the requirements of digitalization, increasing development speed and modern IT."
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