Barloworld Automotive Cruises to 24x7 Availability with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Barloworld Automotive’s business units target very different markets, yet all customers have one thing in common: They expect Barloworld Automotive to meet their transportation needs, from renting cars to fleet management to vehicle sales.

“Our three business units rely on a shared IT infrastructure to support their operations,” said Brian Smith, Operations Manager of IT Shared Services at Barloworld Automotive. “If key business systems aren’t available continuously, we risk not meeting customer delivery expectations.”

Smith provided three examples to clarify the enterprise’s need for continuous availability.

“If your plane arrives at the airport at 2 a.m. and you need to rent a car, our booking engine must be up and running, or you’ll rent from another company. If your business wants control of its fleet’s toll spend, including the E-Toll system, our systems must be available around the clock. And if you go to our website to request an accident repair estimate and see an error page rather than a submission form, you might take your car to a different motor shop.”

Rather than risk these scenarios, Barloworld Automotive chose a proactive route.

“We knew we had to replace our legacy backup tool as it didn’t meet our business needs,” Smith said. “We operate every minute of every day, so our 7,000 internal clients need access to critical systems on the same basis. It’s difficult to provide that level of availability and meet service level agreements (SLAs) when your backup no longer completes within the provided backup window. The legacy backup tool wasn’t meeting the demands of the business or our growing data, which doubled in a three-year period.”

Smith said it became apparent that modern data protection was required for several reasons. The legacy backup tool did not have built-in replication and WAN acceleration for disaster recovery (DR), yet the IT team needed a fast and reliable way to replicate virtual machines (VMs) in 71 branch offices to the data center in Johannesburg. Ready-to-use replicas would enable failover and failback in case of emergency.

“The manual backup process at the branch offices had to be replaced with automated and centralized management, with no intervention required,” Smith said.

The Veeam Solution

Barloworld Automotive addressed these challenges by deploying Veeam® Availability Suite™ for modern data protection. Veeam not only automated and centralized VM management, but it also simplified recovery and improved SLA fulfillment.

“Veeam was the most-suited solution for our business needs,” Smith said. “With automated and centralized VM backup and management, we no longer burden anyone in the branch offices, and we have continuous data availability.”

Veeam backs up 50 TB across 230 VMware vSphere VMs in the data centre and 291 Microsoft Hyper-V VMs in branch offices to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) 3PAR StoreServ. Veeam also replicates VMs in the branch offices to the data center using built-in WAN acceleration, which is advantageous for branches with limited bandwidth.

From an efficiency perspective, Smith said one of the biggest benefits of using Veeam in a mixed-hypervisor environment is VM management under a single pane of glass.

“Veeam provides one console for backup, recovery, replication, monitoring, reporting and capacity planning,” Smith explained. “At any given time, I have a complete view of our virtual environments. I know if a backup needs to be rerun and if we have over- or under-provisioned CPU and memory. We’re proactive with capacity planning and issue resolution, not reactive.

“By replacing the legacy tool with Veeam, we saved money and time,” Smith continued. “We saved nearly 40% in cost and 120 hours each month in troubleshooting backup and recovery issues. Veeam also ‘saves the day’ every time our engineers are alerted to an issue that might have developed into a problem and impacted business operations. The functionality Veeam offers is remarkable. I would recommend Veeam to any company that is serious about modern data protection.”

The Results

• Delivers modern data protection for the enterprise
  Veeam accomplished what the legacy backup tool could not: automated and centralized VM management to ensure critical systems that support each business unit are running around the clock. From the Veeam console, Barloworld has complete visibility and control of its mixed-hypervisor environment.
• Expedites SLA fulfillment with individual business units
  Barloworld Automotive meets SLAs more easily with Veeam due to faster recovery time.
• Saves nearly 40% in backup costs and 120 support hours monthly
  The legacy backup tool required expensive agents in each VM and a separate licensing structure for Barloworld’s virtual environment. By replacing the legacy backup tool with Veeam, Barloworld saved nearly 40% in agent costs and 120 hours monthly in troubleshooting backup and recovery issues.