Reference Story: GeoSphere Austria
"With NetApp Keystone, we successfully unified our storage and backup infrastructure and elevated it to a new level of cost and energy efficiency. The end-to-end flash architecture provides additional flexibility while ensuring high performance and low latency.
The close partnership with Bacher Systems and NetApp was a key success factor in the successful implementation of this important project."
About GeoSphere Austria
GeoSphere Austria is Austria’s national authority for geology, geophysics, climatology, and meteorology. Formed through the merger of the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) and the Geological Survey of Austria (GBA), the organization combines extensive expertise ranging from the atmosphere to the Earth’s interior.
Its mission is to conduct environmental research and provide reliable data and services for science, business, and society. This includes weather and climate data, geological mapping, natural hazard analysis, groundwater protection, and the promotion of renewable energy. GeoSphere Austria supports fact-based decision-making, provides risk warnings, and actively contributes to climate change adaptation and the sustainable development of Austria.
Initial Situation & Challenges
GeoSphere Austria operated a wide range of storage and backup systems across multiple data center locations, each with different end-of-support timelines and depreciation cycles.
The objective was to gradually consolidate these systems between June 2025 and June 2027 while minimizing capital expenditure, ensuring ISO 27001-compliant operations, reducing energy consumption, and meeting future latency requirements — all while keeping migration and project risks to a minimum.
The solution
GeoSphere Austria selected the consumption-based NetApp Keystone® Storage-as-a-Service model (OPEX), enabling flexible and cost-efficient provisioning of storage and backup resources.
At the start of the project, a committed Keystone capacity of 2 PB was deployed, with options for additional expansions of 0.25 PB in future project phases, aligned with evolving data retention and backup requirements. Thanks to scalable capacities, transparent pay-as-you-grow cost control, and cloud-like agility within its own data centers, GeoSphere Austria can respond quickly to increasing data volumes.
As part of the Storage-as-a-Service model, Bacher Systems not only provides the hardware and software but also manages ongoing operations, including proactive monitoring, performance optimization, reporting, patch management, and support. This significantly reduces the administrative workload for GeoSphere Austria while ensuring maximum availability and operational resilience.
Implementation
The implementation was carried out in several phases, supported by the project management expertise of Bacher Systems:
- Phase 1: Consolidation of the NetApp systems, migration of the data, and integration into existing clusters.
- Phase 2: Migration of the IBM storage and backup systems, transition to NAS/iSCSI or optionally SAN.
- Phase 3: Migration of the PURE storage systems, decommissioning of the legacy systems.
- Phase 4: Preparation and implementation of the disaster recovery concept, as well as optimization of the environment.
Detailed procedures, migration concepts, and architecture diagrams were created for every phase. Thanks to this thorough preparation and the support of Bacher Systems, the migration was completed largely without interruption to operations.
Key Benefits for GeoSphere Austria
- Cost Efficiency: The OPEX model reduces high upfront investment costs and provides long-term planning security through fixed pricing over the contract period. The consolidated storage environment also significantly lowers maintenance and operational expenses.
- Reduced Operational Workload: The Managed Storage Service provided by Bacher Systems relieves the internal IT team from daily operational tasks, allowing them to focus on other value-generating projects.
- Unified Backup Infrastructure: Consolidating backup systems into a unified backup architecture standardizes processes, reduces complexity, and significantly simplifies operations and recovery procedures..
- Security & Compliance: Operations are aligned with ISO/IEC 27001 requirements and incorporate advanced security mechanisms, including:
- Multi-Admin Verification (Four-Eyes Principle)
- Two-Factor Authentication
- Efficient snapshot technologies enabling uninterrupted data replications and faster restore times - Energy Savings: By standardizing and consolidating the storage environment using QLC flash technology, GeoSphere Austria reduced the energy consumption of its primary environment by approximately 270,000 kWh per year.
- Flexibility & Scalability: The NetApp Keystone model allows flexible expansions with guaranteed latency for specific workloads at any time.
- Minimized Risk: Proven migration methodologies and comprehensive support from Bacher Systems ensured a smooth transition and stable service availability throughout the project.
Conclusion
Involved companies
Bacher Systems is a NetApp partner in Austria with Prestige Partner status and NetApp's partner in Germany.
NetApp offers solutions for storage and hybrid cloud data management, thereby supporting companies with data storage and cloud solutions, as well as backup and recovery solutions.
