BeA Group: All-Flash Storage for Future-Proof Infrastructure

Founded in 1910, BeA Group offers a wide range of fasteners for industry, trade and timber construction. The BeA brand stands for industrial applications of staple and nail technology in industrial timber construction. The autotec brand comprises customer-specific solutions with a high degree of automation in the production process. As a third brand, KMR offers screwdrivers and compressed air or gas devices, for example, that are tailored to the requirements of the trade. The company employs around 450 people at 17 locations worldwide. Around 180 employees work at the headquarters in Ahrensburg.

Full Focus on Cyber Resilience

Whether in production, administration or customer service: Digitalization is a big priority in the company and is intended to help improve production processes, speed up processes or strengthen customer loyalty. However, increasing digitalization also increases the scope of attack for cybercriminals. This was the experience BeA Group had to make in 2023 November when the company was the victim of a cyberattack.

In order to protect themselves against cyberattacks in the future and increase the cyber resilience of the company as a whole, the parties responsible decided to modernise and completely restructure the IT infrastructure. The project started at the end of 2023 and is expected to be completed next year.

During the course of the complete renewal of the infrastructure, the focus also shifted to the previous storage solution. This solution was almost ten years old and repeatedly reached its limits in terms of performance and capacity. “That’s why we had long-term plans to install new storage and use modern storage technologies such as All-Flash,” says Tobias Biermann, Head of IT at the BeA Group.

Seamless Integration in Just a Few Hours

Since autumn 2023, the BeA Group needed to reliably support the value chain with new IT infrastructure extremely quickly. “Our long-standing IT service provider provided us with a Huawei OceanStor Dorado 2000 as live storage with a capacity of 18 terabytes at short notice,” recalls Tobias Biermann. The solution was fully utilised by the data from the BeA Group’s file server.

Huawei responded right away and provided the fastening specialist with the Huawei OceanStor Dorado 6000 almost overnight. Tobias Biermann and his IT team had very good experiences with the high-end device designed for mass storage. After further analysis of costs, benefits and functions, it quickly became clear that Huawei’s storage hardware will continue to be used by the BeA Group in the future.

The Huawei OceanStor Dorado and OceanProtect were ultimately chosen. The storage solution could be seamlessly embedded in the new infrastructure. "The installation was complete in just a few hours. And our 17 locations were also connected easily," says Stefan Krause, IT Infrastructure Team Leader at the BeA Group. The company now stores about 80 terabytes of data on the system, with enough space for future data growth. Cybersecurity was also very important to the IT team. Here, Huawei Ransomware Protection Storage protects both primary and backup storage.

Secured Storage Power

Huawei immediately helped the BeA Group build the new infrastructure at the end of 2023 with powerful storage solutions. Since then, performance and capacity bottlenecks - the BeA still recorded in the old storage landscape - have been a thing of the past. “Our Huawei OceanStor Dorado 5000 provided an enormous performance boost - both in the storage and network environment and in the application landscape,” says Stefan Krause. Not only has the performance of the ERP system improved significantly, but data backup is also faster: The backup processes installed on multiple servers previously ran overnight and took up to eight hours. With the new storage hardware, the backup jobs are now done in less than three hours.

In addition to the broad range of functions, it was important for the IT team that the storage solution not only fits the new infrastructure, but also the strategic direction of the company. As the BeA Group will be subject to the EU NIS2 directive, the IT team is already placing great importance on a secure, high-availability storage environment. Tobias Biermann comments: "In Germany, we are not part of the critical infrastructure, but important infrastructure, which is why we have to meet the cyber protection requirements associated with NIS2. It is therefore advantageous that the Huawei solution also increases cyber resilience in the company."

Speaking of the directive: With the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and other regulatory requirements at European and national level, BeA must also fulfil demands in terms of sustainability. “Here, the new storage solution helps us to be more energy-efficient,” reports Stefan Krause, as it consumes less energy than the old storage hardware and scores points with an environmentally friendly design.

More about the BeA Group

The company processes several million staples, nails and screws worldwide every day. No other manufacturer supplies more self-loading nailers and staplers for automated industrial production. There is also a wide range of compressed air-operated fastening systems for furniture production. The company employs 450 people and is represented in more than 40 countries with 14 subsidiaries, three branches and additional sales partners.

For more information, visit: https://www.bea-group.com/

Tobias Biermann (left in the picture) and Stefan Krause