Seamless migration: CDW enhances business continuity with data resilience from Veeam

By keeping up with the fast-changing technological landscape, CDW has achieved a market-leading position. To retain this advantage, the company’s platform engineering team continually evaluates existing technology investments and identifies opportunities for improvement.

“Our customers look to us for best practices when it comes to harnessing technology, so it’s essential that we continue to evolve our IT infrastructure to take advantage of the latest innovations,” said Justin Smith, Director of Platform Engineering at CDW. “We wanted to diversify our hypervisor environment to avoid putting all our eggs in one basket. At the same time, we needed to ensure we protected the business from downtime.” 

Specifically, CDW wanted to expand its virtual footprint to include Microsoft Azure Local, but found out the existing product investments wouldn’t address migration needs in the time available. The company began looking for technology it could use to bridge the gap.

“At CDW, we believe in running workloads wherever they run most efficiently — whether that’s in the cloud or on-premises,” said Smith. “But to realize this concept, we first needed to unchain our data so that we could move it between platforms. We kicked off a search for a great solution to help us do that.”

CDW chose Veeam to enable data portability, enhancing its agility and helping to future-proof the company’s IT infrastructure. 

“We set three goals for the new solution: facilitate data migrations between different platforms, provide powerful capabilities for long-term data retention, and enable efficient, reliable data replication to support fast recovery,” said Smith. “We were confident Veeam could deliver on all three.” 

In Veeam, CDW found a platform-agnostic tool for data movement and data resilience. The platform engineering team was delighted to encounter little to no learning curve with the Veeam technology.

“Veeam plugged right into our existing investments,” said Chris Monroe, Principal Architect, Platform Engineering at CDW. “Veeam isn’t really impacted by the specific CPU or operating system — it provides data resilience no matter where the data resides. Best of all, we were able to implement Veeam very quickly, and our team picked it up immediately due to the intuitive user interface.”

Following a successful proof of concept, CDW began using Veeam to migrate virtual machines from legacy hypervisors.

“The PoC demonstrated that Veeam was between 6x and 10x faster at migrations compared to the native tools,” said Monroe. “We started with 40 VMs and quickly realized that Veeam would give our support engineers a super-low-touch migration experience with relatively minimal oversight and that users wouldn’t even notice the move. Over the last year, we’ve migrated 886 VMs using Veeam, diversifying our technology landscape significantly.”

With Veeam, CDW is maintaining a high level of resilience for its data. By keeping data recovery times low, the company is empowering its employees to work productively. 

“We have a year-over-year effort to improve our business continuity capabilities and recovery times,” said Monroe. “With Veeam, we were able to undertake a major diversification project while enabling data recovery times of four hours or less, which is a big win. Veeam will also help us bounce back from any potential incidents affecting our IT services quickly and efficiently.”

Looking ahead, CDW is excited about exploring the full Veeam product set, including recovery orchestration and Kubernetes backup and DR capabilities.

“Veeam has proved to be a real difference maker when it comes to our data resilience,” said Smith. “The data portability it offers means it’s more than just a data protection solution — it’s a true data resilience platform that we’re confident will pay dividends for years to come.”

• Enabled the seamless movement of hundreds of VMs between platforms, unlocking unprecedented agility
  “From my perspective, Veeam equals data portability, which is a competitive advantage in today’s market that cannot be overstated. Veeam offers us the flexibility to make technology decisions that serve our customers incredibly well.” Justin Smith, Director of Platform Engineering, CDW 
• Capped data recovery times at less than four hours, facilitating superb business continuity
  By protecting its users from disruption with Veeam, CDW is empowering them to work more productively.