Boosting data resilience: How TFG achieves 80% faster recovery with Veeam

To differentiate itself from the competition, TFG carefully harnesses customer data to shape memorable, personalized experiences across multiple channels.

“We must deliver the right product to the right customer at the right time,” said Edward Woolls, Head of Infrastructure Operations at TFG Infotec. “Data plays an essential role in making this happen, so we take managing and securing this information very seriously. Since our data grows by as much as 40% each year, it’s an ongoing challenge.”

TFG continually optimizes its technology infrastructure to enable it to harness data more effectively. To unlock greater agility, the company recently adopted a containerization and hybrid cloud strategy. With backup jobs overrunning and threatening to affect production systems, TFG initiated a search for a new data protection solution.

“Embracing containers and a hybrid cloud platform helped us improve our ability to respond to changing demands, but we still needed to update our data protection capabilities to avoid interruptions to our operations,” said Woolls. “With the threat of cyber-attack growing, safeguarding our data has never been more important.”

To provide future-proof data protection and enable round-the-clock business continuity for its retail operations, TFG selected Veeam.

“It’s hard to talk about Veeam without sounding like a Veeam salesperson, but it really does deliver on multiple fronts,” said Woolls. “Most important to us was that our analysis showed that Veeam connects best with the latest technologies. The feature set included must-haves for us, such as encryption, immutability and storage compression. In our view, it was the best solution to come with us on our hybrid cloud transformation.”

Currently, TFG uses Veeam to protect approximately 300 TB of production data, with a policy that combines daily, weekly and monthly backups and varying retention periods according to the criticality of the application. The company replicates data between its two corporate data centers and stores backups on Pure Storage arrays.

“The integration between Veeam and Pure Storage is phenomenal — they work together so seamlessly, you’d expect the technologies to come from the same vendor,” said Woolls. “We’re taking full advantage of how well Veeam and Pure Storage work together to build multiple layers of resilience into our data protection strategy for applications ranging from stock management to point of sales.”

TFG uses Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes to protect its Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform, which consists of 120 namespaces and five clusters. The most critical part of this platform is the company’s application integration engine, which ensures that transactions flow quickly and reliably across all retail and financial services operations.

“Finding a Kubernetes-native data protection solution was a requirement that was very suddenly thrust upon me and my team, but we soon realized that Kasten was a cut above the rest,” said Woolls. “Kasten performs exceptionally well for a variety of use cases, including application mobility, backup and restore, disaster recovery and ransomware protection.”

Since deploying Veeam, TFG has seen a dramatic increase in data protection efficiency. As a result, the company is making better use of resources while enabling superior omnichannel experiences that keep customers coming back for more.

“Straight away, Veeam slashed backup times by as much as 70%, removing any impact on our production systems,” said Woolls. “So, a 14 TB database that used to take five hours to back up now takes just 20 minutes with Veeam, for example. Deduplication and storage compression through Veeam have reduced our backup storage use by around 40%, driving down costs significantly. And crucially we can now recover critical systems up to 80% faster. By helping to ensure that TFG can operate without interruption, Veeam is contributing to our competitive edge.”

Next on the agenda, TFG plans to roll out advanced Veeam functionality such as ransomware scanning and recovery orchestration.

“There are so many powerful automation features built into our Veeam solutions that we have yet to implement,” said Woolls. “That’s the next chapter in our Veeam journey, and we’re excited to find out what we’ll achieve together next.”

• 70% reduction in backup times eliminates impact on production systems
  TFG benefits from comprehensive data protection that does not slow down its key business services, helping to keep employee productivity high.
• 40% saving on backup storage reduces data protection costs
  Using deduplication and storage compression, TFG is optimizing use of resources to do more with less.
• 80% faster data recovery boosts business continuity
  By speeding up data recovery times, TFG is enabling more consistent delivery of outstanding omnichannel experiences, giving it an edge in a crowded market.