Lamps Plus reduces risk and cuts costs with Veeam Vault

Through its online store and dozens of brick-and-mortar branches across the Western U.S., Lamps Plus offers lighting, furniture, and a vast range of home décor products.

Lamps Plus focuses on product and customer service excellence, relying on its extensive IT infrastructure to support its online and in-store channels.

Eric Denholtz, Senior Systems Engineer, Lamps Plus, said, “We have around 300 virtual servers running key applications, such as our warehouse management system, as well as approximately 1,200 endpoint devices across our warehouses, call centers, corporate headquarters and retail stores. Most of our customers choose to buy via our ecommerce site, and we depend on our corporate IT environment to keep online orders flowing out of our warehouses.”

For Lamps Plus, even a few hours of downtime could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales. To mitigate financial and reputational risks, the company looked to enhance its data resilience and security, while enabling robust, rapid, and reliable recovery.

“In the past, we relied on a legacy, agent-based tool, but we were only able to back up around 30% of our corporate IT environment,” said Denholtz. “With risks such as ransomware on the rise, we needed to take action to improve our security posture. We looked for a way to back up the entire corporate IT environment, introduce redundancy for critical systems and create hardened, immutable backups of production data.”

After assessing the data protection market, Lamps Plus saw Veeam Data Platform as the clear choice. In addition to offering a powerful backup and recovery solution with strong technical support, Veeam empowered Lamps Plus to elevate its security posture, including secure offsite backup with Veeam Vault. For Lamps Plus, Veeam forms the last layer of a mature, defense-in-depth approach to information security, including managed and extended detection and response and a security operations center.

“Veeam really did tick all our boxes — no other vendor was even in the same league,” said Denholtz. “The fact that Veeam is platform agnostic was a big deal for us, because it allows me to choose the most cost-effective infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud. As an engineer myself, the knowledge that Veeam is an engineering-centric company is also very reassuring. Veeam is constantly innovating and introducing new capabilities, and they always lead the pack in analyst reviews.”

Initially, Lamps Plus deployed Veeam to create immutable off-site backups using an existing cloud-based object storage service. However, the cost, reliability and time required to recover from this destination led the company to switch to Veeam Vault. A fully managed, secure and predictable cloud storage resource, Veeam Vault offers easy, yet highly reliable and secure business continuity capabilities at a significantly lower total cost of ownership.

“With our previous object storage service, there was always a nagging question about how we’d get our 200 TB of data out if we ever needed to restore from our backups,” said Denholtz. “With Veeam Vault, we can quickly restore our VMs on-premises or directly to Azure — providing us the rapid recovery option that we were missing before. Crucially, Veeam offers this capability at highly competitive per-terabyte pricing.”

Working with Veeam, Lamps Plus migrated data from its previous cloud provider directly to Veeam Vault, avoiding any impact on the company’s on-premises networking and storage infrastructure.

Denholtz said, “While migrating our object storage to another provider would have been a very complicated proposition involving Azure Data Factory, many hours of engineering and high costs, with Veeam it was simple.”

Today, the company follows the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule by using Veeam to protect data between its two on-premises data centers and three virtual storage repositories to Veeam Vault.

“Getting up and running with Veeam Vault was a breeze,” said Denholtz. “Even though we were getting started just days after Veeam launched the product, everything went very smoothly. The support and documentation from Veeam were great, and the pricing is totally transparent. Veeam One, our management and monitoring solution, has also been a godsend. It helps us with everything from standard outage alerts to quarterly capacity planning decisions.”

Using Virtual Labs in Veeam, the company can test patches and upgrades before deploying them in production, leveraging Instant Recovery to accelerate the process. Denholtz said, “Veeam’s Instant Recovery capability alone has saved us hundreds of hours.”

Today, Lamps Plus backs up practically all the data in its corporate IT environment twice each day. Through its partnership with Veeam, the company is reducing its exposure to downtime risks while saving valuable time for cybersecurity activities.

“With Veeam, we don’t need a storage engineer or backup administrator,” said Denholtz. “Any member of the IT team — including level one helpdesk technicians — can restore files and systems easily. With Veeam in place, we have reduced risk, cut costs, and enabled rapid recovery to ensure we can continue to serve our customers across the world.”

• Extends backup coverage from 30% to 99% with Veeam Data Platform, reducing the risk of operational disruption
  Lamps Plus replaced legacy, agent-based backups with a modern data resilience solution from Veeam that creates immutable copies of mission-critical data for rapid, dependable recovery.
• Cuts costs with automated backup and reporting capabilities
  “With Veeam, I can plan for our future capacity needs, identify potential issues and restore individual files or whole VMs within minutes,” said Denholtz. “Veeam saves me hundreds of hours of manual work a year.”
• Streamlines secure offsite backup on budget with Veeam Vault
  Today, Lamps Plus can use backups in Veeam Vault to rapidly spin up recovery instances in Azure without bill shock or overspend. “If we ever need to restore from our backups, we know we can do that very quickly and effectively with Veeam,” said Denholtz.