Case Study: Gatwick Airport achieves rapid VM recovery and 24x7 high availability with Veeam Backup & Replication

Gatwick Airport Takes Off Toward High Availability with Veeam and HPE

London Gatwick Airport, the UK’s second-largest airport handling more than 39 million passengers a year, needed to protect dozens of mission-critical systems that support check‑in, security, baggage and flight operations. With about 60% of its infrastructure virtualised (250 VMs) and services requiring 24x7x365 availability, slow, agent-based backups and multi-hour VM rebuilds created unacceptable risk of downtime, passenger delays and reputational damage.

Gatwick deployed Veeam Backup & Replication with HPE storage to enable Instant VM Recovery and snapshot-based restores, cutting recovery times from hours to minutes and allowing granular recovery via Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots. The solution backs up 250 VMs across two data centers, compressing and deduplicating 30 TB to 4 TB on HPE StoreOnce (and 8 TB to 1.5 TB on HPE 3PAR), maintaining resiliency, reducing risk of operational disruption and conserving backup storage.

Gatwick Airport

Sherif Darwish

Head of IT Infrastructure