D&S unlocks 10X performance and 99% faster recovery

Founded in 1921 as a construction company, DIRINGER & SCHEIDEL (D&S) has grown far beyond its roots into a major German conglomerate. The family-run group provides construction, civil engineering, and technology development, alongside project and property development, facilities management, and retirement home, care facility, and hotel operations. Headquartered in Mannheim, D&S employs some 4,300 people across 90 locations.

More than 60 distinct businesses make up the D&S group. It specializes in everything from manufacturing robots for pipeline inspection and repair to managing world-class hotels for brands such as Hilton and Radisson. 

Yet for all this scale, the team responsible for managing the infrastructure underpinning group-wide operations consists of just 16 people, fighting a daily battle against the high stakes of downtime. Disruption or failure in the storage layer could quickly bring operations to a halt, with severe consequences. 

Oded Rosenfeld, Head of IT at D&S, elaborates: “Take one of our group companies, which specializes in the extraction of a rare type of sand used by some of the world’s largest building materials manufacturers. If they experienced a production halt, it would result in direct losses of around $190,000 a day. In addition, it would take 14 days to get the special extraction machinery up and running again.”  

Financial losses aren’t the only thing at stake. As an operator of critical infrastructure, including water pipelines for entire cities and care facilities for the elderly, D&S is bound by strict regulations, including the EU Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) and Germany’s BSI Act and related KRITIS critical infrastructure regulations, which all legally mandate high levels of resilience.

Meeting these operational and regulatory demands was becoming more difficult, however, due to an underperforming and hard-to-manage storage environment.

The storage infrastructure at D&S presented major technical and management frustrations. Legacy systems demanded constant manual intervention, with outdated management tools and complex troubleshooting at every turn. 

A recent attempt at renewal only compounded the challenge. Choosing a provider with a lower initial price point came at an unexpected cost. A promised active-active cluster never materialized, even after D&S invested in expensive virtual storage arrays and supporting hardware. Synchronization failures were common and maintenance was a headache, requiring the IT team to constantly check log files and physically inspect the server room for errors that software failed to report.

Something had to change. Storage demands were only growing, piling more pressure on an IT team that was already stretched to its limit. Rosenfeld knew it was time to convince group leadership to take storage in a new direction.

Everpure had been on the group’s radar for years, and now its moment had come. D&S made its first move in 2024, introducing an Everpure FlashBlade//S™ storage array alongside its existing Veeam data resilience software for backup and protection of its core systems.  

“With Everpure, we felt the difference right from the moment of deployment,” recalls Rosenfeld. “Unlike other storage providers who spent weeks getting systems installed, migrated, and integrated, Everpure FlashBlade® was up and running in 20 minutes. We almost couldn’t believe how easy it was.” 

Everpure integrates closely with the group’s existing Veeam backup solution. Using Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery together with Everpure SafeMode™ Snapshots, which provide immutable data protection, D&S ensures rapid recovery and robust ransomware protection. Veeam initially backs up virtual machines as objects in an S3-compatible store on the primary FlashBlade, then replicates them to the secondary FlashBlade.

“Multiple businesses within our group must comply with NIS2 and BSI KRITIS regulatory standards,” says Rosenfeld. “The combination of Everpure and Veeam technologies helps with this, providing extremely robust protection for critical systems against cybersecurity threats such as ransomware.”

Convinced by the strong backup performance of Everpure, D&S has since deployed a pair of Everpure FlashArray//X™ systems as the storage layer in a modern private cloud hosting the group’s main VMware landscape. These all-flash arrays deliver excellent performance and efficiency for some 50TB of data and counting.  

D&S continues to add new Everpure arrays to its landscape. The group is currently working to introduce a second backup tier, based on FlashBlade storage, for cross-data-center replication. As other storage systems reach end of life, D&S plans to replace them with the latest Everpure arrays. The company expects to be running completely on Everpure within the next two years. 

The group is also exploring a move to Microsoft Hyper-V in the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. As a hypervisor-agnostic platform, Everpure provides an ideal foundation for supporting this shift without disrupting the storage layer.

The Everpure solutions are delivered through the Evergreen//One™ storage-as-a-service model, which offers simplified, consumption-based pricing, guaranteed SLAs for performance and availability, and nondisruptive upgrades.

“For me, Evergreen//One is the single most valuable part of Everpure’s offering,” says Rosenfeld. “We don’t have to wonder if there’s enough capacity, whether performance is where it should be, or when the next upgrade is due. Everpure handles it all, and we just get to enjoy the results. It has transformed storage from an asset we have to manage into a utility we simply switch on, like water or electricity.”

Backup and recovery have been transformed, giving D&S the ability to recover fast, with full confidence in the integrity of its data. Under its previous approach, the group estimates it could have taken up to five-and-a-half months to restore its entire environment. With Everpure, that figure has fallen to half a day.  

“The gains we’ve made in recovery time make a huge difference,” notes Rosenfeld. “There’s really no point in having a backup if you can’t restore rapidly. We can’t just tell our customers to wait months before we’re operational again. With Everpure and Veeam, recovery times fell from months to half a day.”

The months-to-hours improvement translates into tangible operational impact. In D&S’s sand production facility, for example, a full environmental restoration taking almost half a year would have caused losses exceeding $30 million. By reducing that window to half a day, Everpure helps avoid millions of dollars in potential losses while protecting the company’s global reputation.

Demonstrable data resilience also gives D&S a sharper strategic edge. Proven defense and recovery capabilities are now a prerequisite for securing contracts with government bodies and private sector clients, as well as for obtaining insurance coverage.

Rosenfeld explains: “For many of our businesses, including care facilities, critical infrastructure projects, and hotel operations, we need to demonstrate backup and resilience or we cannot win the license to operate. With Everpure, we have no problem meeting these requirements.”

D&S has experienced enormous improvements in storage performance since transitioning to Everpure. 

“With Everpure, performance is 10 times higher than before,” comments Rosenfeld. “Our FlashBlade backup is actually faster than the primary storage it supports, which is a big reason why we’re looking forward to running everything on Everpure eventually.”

Faster storage has a direct effect on system response times across the business. Citrix login times have fallen from an average of two minutes to 15 seconds. Meanwhile, 3D calculations that once took two to three hours to process—due to a storage bottleneck—now complete almost instantly.

Everpure has delivered similar efficiencies around D&S’s hardware footprint and energy consumption. Versus existing systems, which easily take up an entire rack for storage alone, an Everpure array offering the same capacity typically needs just 3U of space. 

The physical consolidation has led to a massive reduction in the group's energy consumption, as Rosenfeld states: “Our previous storage environment consumed around 12,500kWh of electricity. Following the transition to Everpure, our electricity usage has dropped to roughly 750kWh.” 

The reduced power draw has a cascading effect on supporting infrastructure. Where D&S previously required 75 to 150kVA uninterruptible power supplies to support its legacy environment, its Everpure systems require significantly less power protection, leading to further savings on equipment and maintenance.

For Rosenfeld and his team, by far the biggest win has been the administrative weight that Evergreen//One has lifted. D&S estimates that the storage-as-a-service model saves 100 to 150 labor days a year, with Everpure proactively monitoring the system, managing upgrades, and addressing any issues.  

“Everpure has taken a huge amount of workload off my desk,” says Rosenfeld. “It makes life much easier for me and my team. Storage is one thing that I don’t have to worry about anymore. We’re also no longer dependent on individuals with specialist skills and knowledge of the environment. Everything is now clearly documented and easily accessible, so anyone can maintain it.”

With manual troubleshooting and configuration work off its plate, D&S’s IT team is free to focus on strategic priorities like AI readiness, ensuring that the business is ready for what’s next. 

Rosenfeld concludes: “I can’t praise Everpure enough. The performance is insane, the maintenance is minimal, and we have complete confidence in the availability and integrity of our data. Storage used to hold us back. Now it helps us run faster and better. Everpure really is the future.”