Germain Hôtels sleeps soundly with 30X faster data backup and recovery from Veeam

Germain Hôtels is a business that doesn’t like to follow the crowd. A high level of customer service is key in the hospitality industry, but Germain Hôtels is also committed to sustainable hospitality by respecting the environment and the communities in which it operates its hotels. 

This vision depends on driving constant technological improvements to ensure everyday operations, such as managing bookings, become easier for employees across all the company’s hotels and restaurants. When team members are happy and productive, they can focus on ensuring all guests experience the comfort and elegance that has become synonymous with Germain Hôtels.

“We are lucky compared to other industries because what we offer is an experience to our guests; if our back-office systems go down, we can still provide exceptional service levels,” said Charles Bureau, Vice-President of IT at Germain Hôtels. “However, losing the ability to accept online reservations and payments would have a huge impact. And as we become more and more reliant on technology, the need to switch to manual operations in a crisis scenario would put immense pressure on our team members.”

In addition to protecting the physical and virtual servers that run vital systems in its service center and hotels, Germain Hôtels must accommodate growing volumes of transactional data. In the case of credit card transactions, this data is governed by strict industry regulations. In parallel, Germain Hôtels must comply with data-protection and privacy legislation, such as Quebec’s Law 25, which enforces rules around data access, retention, and sovereignty. 

The company’s previous backup solution worked entirely at the file level, making it unsuitable for protecting databases and virtual machine (VM) workloads. To replace that solution, Germain Hôtels chose Veeam for its ability to back up everything from the bare-metal level onward, giving peace of mind that all data will be accurately and reliably protected. 

Seeking to re-evaluate its data protection and disaster recovery (DR) strategy, Germain Hôtels engaged Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) Opti9 for support in implementing Veeam across their entire business. Together with Opti9, the hotel chain re-architected its backup and DR infrastructure. Today, Veeam protects both centralized workloads running in Germain Hôtels’ service center and systems running in individual hotels (e.g., systems for configuring smartcard room keys). Having these local backups enables fast and convenient recovery managed remotely by Veeam specialists in the Service Center. The local backups are replicated to the central site in case of a total loss of IT at any hotel. And, to meet the 3-2-1-1-0 best-practice policy for backups, all of Germain Hôtels’ data is further replicated offsite by leveraging Veeam Cloud Connect to a private cloud managed by Opti9. This cloud offers guaranteed data storage within Canadian borders, enabling Germain Hôtels to fulfill compliance with all relevant legislation around data sovereignty. In addition to providing offsite storage for backups, the Opti9 cloud provides a remote recovery capability to Germain Hôtels: if its entire service center went down, the company could get vital virtual machines back up and running rapidly on Opti9. 

Germain Hôtels uses Veeam to protect a few hundred virtual servers across its entire landscape, with the appropriate backup retention and policies depending on the criticality of the system. 

With Veeam, Germain Hôtels has drastically cut its backup and recovery times, reducing the risk of business operation disruptions. Now, recovering a complete system takes just a few hours compared to the full week it could take with the previous solution – approximately a 30-times improvement in recovery speed. 

“After implementing Veeam, we had a situation where a fileserver was compromised,” said Radhouane Nasrallah, IT Infrastructure Manager at Germain Hôtels. “We succeeded in recovering it in a few hours without any issues or disruption to operations. This saved a lot of stress for our team members.

Jean-François Tanguay, IT Security Manager at Germain Hôtels, added: “Aside from the high quality of the Veeam solution itself, working with a highly skilled partner like Opti9 has given us a great deal of confidence.”

By using Veeam, the company saves on backup costs: “Having one solution to control everything lowers operational costs,” noted Charles. The IT team at Germain Hôtels finds Veeam user-friendly and easy to manage. With the support provided by Opti9, there is also a low ongoing support burden.

“We monitor Veeam from our side, but we don't often make changes,” said Radhouane. “If we need to add a new VM into the environment, it’s very easy to integrate with our existing backup jobs. And we also have support and monitoring from Opti 9, which helps us solve any issues that may arise.”

Germain Hôtels has worked with Veeam and Opti9 for over a decade and they are excited to continue growing together. “It’s a matter of trust,” said Charles. “I don’t have to worry about the backups every day. I sleep well having had long-term proof of Veeam’s reliability.” Indeed, just as guests know they can expect an exceptional stay when they choose Germain Hôtels, the company’s IT team can relax knowing its data and systems are safe with Veeam and Opti9.

• Recovers data 30 times faster than before
  As well as providing faster backups, Veeam accelerates data recovery times from one week to a few hours, helping to ensure operations around the clock.
• Saves money on backup-related costs and reduces associated admin
  By standardizing and simplifying backup and recovery tasks with a single point of control, Veeam helps Germain Hôtels reduce operational costs and admin tasks.
• Provides peace of mind that all critical data is protected
  Veeam and the cloud recovery resources from Opti9 combine to reassure Germain Hôtels that its vital systems and data are protected against corruption or loss.