Havmor Ice Cream has been curating novelty flavors since 1944 and boasts of over 160 varieties of ice creams. In fact, the brand’s success in the highly competitive ice cream industry rests on its ability to constantly innovate beside the unwavering focus on the core 3 values of Acchai (Goodness), Sachhai (Truthfulness) and Safai (Cleanliness), which together form a solid foundation for the business.
With its unique and innovative seasonal flavor offerings and stringent adherence to the quality processes, the company is 100% dependent on data. Because of the customization of everything it produces, Havmor needs to have data available real-time, at all times, for the manufacturing process to continue.
“Availability of business-critical data is absolutely critical to enable the innovation and customer delight that Havmor prides. For this, our business depends heavily on the IT systems and would suffer sales/revenues losses in the event of downtime,” explains Dhaval Mankad, Vice President — IT, Havmor Ice Cream, who is responsible for the company’s overall IT operations.
However, the company’s existing IT systems had limitations of offering the reliability needed to ensure high data availability. The dated backup infrastructure, based on tape drives, provided a very long backup window while the updated backups were always not available, disrupting the entire business. Meanwhile, the IT systems were not able to meet the business need for quick and reliable data recovery.
“We are mostly a virtualized environment with a small footprint of physical servers, and it is imperative for us to maintain high availability. But, we weren’t getting 100% of our full information and our client base backups were creating a problem. Similarly, with our Disaster Recovery (DR) set up, we weren’t getting the holistic capabilities that our business needed in a single pane of glass,” adds Dhaval Mankad.
Furthermore, existing tools, which were used to monitor the virtual infrastructure, provided only partial visibility for monitoring, reporting and capacity planning.
Faced with the challenge of ensuring high availability of business-critical data to enable the business to continue to innovate, Dhaval Mankad set upon the task of replacing the company’s dated backup infrastructure with a reliable backup and recovery system.
After evaluating various solutions available in the market, Mankad zeroed in on Veeam as the trusted partner for addressing the company’s data challenges.
The fact that Veeam provided an all in one solution, that was both cost effective and easy to manage, was the decisive factor in choosing Veeam. “The simplicity and ease of use means we can always have total confidence that the system is helping to keep our business data safe and highly available,” says Dhaval Mankad.
Among the other factors that helped Dhaval Mankad to choose the Veeam solution was the tapeless backup environment it provided along with the ease of use. He was also impressed with the solution’s speed of recovery with reliable backup consistency check.
Dhaval Mankad and his team worked closely with the team at Veeam to land on the right-fit solution of Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise edition. Veeam Backup & Replication protected the virtualized environment and the physical servers and endpoints were protected with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows.
The Veeam solution protects 30 terabytes of business-critical data across two locations and a total combination of 15 virtual machines (VMs), two physical servers and 100 end points. The environment has Veeam Backup & Replication serve as a virtual machine for Disaster Recovery (DR). The backup server caters to the role of proxy server and backup repository server. The main datacenter contains another backup repository server managed by backup server from DR.
Additionally, the Veeam Agent for Windows (Server) maintains backup for physical servers while Veeam Agent for Windows (Workstation) takes care of end-user device backups.
With automated alerts and visibility of status, the solution has helped Havmor cut down its backup processes by over 80%. It has also enabled man-hour savings in data recovery, taking only 20 minutes to recover a server if needed.
The overall increase in backup frequency has given Havmor more comfort on data availability. The additional restore points help keep 15 days of backup available. In fact, when Havmor once faced a Ransomware attack on one of its critical applications, the additional restore point helped in successful restore with very minimal data loss.
Veeam has also helped Havmor achieve a backup of the end points directly on to the Microsoft OneDrive for Business solution, thus, eliminating the on-premise hardware requirement.
Furthermore, the easy one-click recovery and granular data recovery options provided by the Veeam solution have significantly improved reliability of restoring the backed-up data from the repository to the live environment, boosting confidence in data security. “Since implementing Veeam we have seen significant difference in the speed with which we can recover data, ensuring that our employees receive minimal interruptions to their day-to-day jobs, including seamless end point protection,” cites Dhaval Mankad.
Havmor Ice Cream, a part of South Korea based Lotte Confectionery, is one of the largest ice cream brands in India. In the last decade, Havmor has grown ten-fold, establishing a strong presence and emerging as one of the fastest growing and most loved ice cream brands in the country. Its wide product range is available across 14 states in India through a large network of distributors, dealers, franchisees and Havfunn parlors. It is one of the few ice cream brands in India that operates both in retail with a network of over 40,000 ice cream outlets, and a franchisee parlor model. It operates over 150+ flagship ice cream parlors across the country with plans for pan India presence in next couple of years.
Havmor’s challenge was data availability as the legacy IT systems had limitations of offering the reliability needed. The dated backup infrastructure, based on tape drives, provided a very long backup window while the updated backups were not available at all times, disrupting the entire business. The IT systems were also not able to meet the business need for quick and reliable data recovery.