HDI Seguros has operated in Brazil since 1979 and now has more than 60 branches. The company’s IT environment is 100% virtualized and includes approximately 65TB of data. Two datacenters house more than 300 VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs) that operate critical functions such as an insurance registration system.
In the past, HDI Seguros used the same backup tool for its physical machines and VMs. Because the legacy tool was designed for physical machines, it backed up and recovered VMs inefficiently, and backups required a lot of storage space. Ricardo Strazzi, Information Technology Infrastructure Coordinator at HDI Seguros, said he and his colleagues weren’t aware of a more adequate solution, so VMs were treated like physical servers.
“If there was 50GB of data, 50GB of free space was required to perform the backup. If the data increased to 51GB on the following day, the backup had to be repeated and required even more space. The VMs performed slowly and the backup process took too long, making it impossible to perform an emergency backup.”
The company learned about Veeam Backup & Replication in 2009 while searching for a solution that met the needs of its IT environment. HDI Seguros backs up more than 15TB of data daily, but its legacy backup tool didn’t have deduplicaton and compression.
“The backup process was impractical without deduplication and compression,” Strazzi said. “We also didn’t like that our legacy backup tool depended on agents because too much time was spent deploying and updating them in each VM.”
HDI Seguros chose a data protection solution from Veeam Software because Strazzi and his colleagues considered Veeam a pioneer in virtualization. Designed specifically for virtualized environments, Veeam Backup & Replication provides agentless, powerful, easy-to-use and affordable backup, recovery and replication for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.
“For us, a safe backup is a complete and consistent backup,” Strazzi explained. “With Veeam’s built-in deduplication, only the most recent changes are backed up, and with Veeam’s built-in compression, our backups require less storage. Our backup became four times faster with Veeam.”
HDI Seguros chose Veeam Backup & Replication for additional reasons. Veeam was more cost-effective than the other backup tools because they were licensed per VM to be backed up. Veeam is licensed per CPU socket on VM hosts that are being backed up. HDI Seguros also chose Veeam for its fast and easy recovery capabilities. Strazzi said Veeam has “saved the day” for the company several times, mainly in the production environment.
“Sometimes a software update didn’t go well or VMs froze,” he explained. “On every occasion, Veeam enabled the restoration of the entire VM in a few minutes. We’ve used this solution for four years, and there has never been a day that we haven’t been able to perform a successful backup or recover a critical application.”
HDI Seguros has a data retention policy of 10 years. Before Veeam, the company relied on an extra conversion step to move backups from disk to tape, but this issue has been solved. Veeam Backup & Replication lets organizations archive backups on disk, tape and to the cloud. HDI Seguros archives Veeam backups to tape for offsite storage.
Strazzi said the IT team at HDI Seguros is very satisfied with Veeam.
“Whenever possible, I tell IT professionals to test Veeam Backup & Replication, assess its cost and compare its ease-of-use because they will see that the advantages are infinite,” he said. “In my opinion, the main benefits of Veeam are faster backups, decreased backup storage, safe recovery, an attractive price and great technological advantages.”
Anytime the IT team has questions or concerns, it contacts Veeam’ssupport team and receives help in a timely manner. ”Every support representative from Veeam has the capacity to solve the problem presented, without having to accelerate it several levels,” Strazzi said.
Backup is four times faster and saves on storage
Veeam Backup & Replication requires only one full backup, followed by fast incremental backups that take advantage of Veeam’s built-in data deduplication and compression, resulting in reduced storage requirements.
VM recovery is fast and safe
If VMs freeze or have performance issues, the IT team recovers applications, files and individual items in a few minutes with Veeam. “My favorite feature is Instant VM Recovery,” Strazzi said. “It has never failed us.”
Perfect solution for virtual environment
Strazzi recommends Veeam Backup & Replication to peers because he believes it will work perfectly in the IT environment of any company that has opted for virtualization.