Finnish Brewery and Soft Drink Company Raises a Glass to Veeam for Meeting SLAs

The Business Challenge

Olvi Oyj faces many of the same IT challenges that enterprise companies face, but without the seemingly endless resources to address them. One of these challenges was meeting internal service level agreements (SLAs) with individual business units.

To overcome this challenge, Olvi virtualised its IT infrastructure on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V with the hope that high availability achieved through fast backup and recovery of virtual machines (VMs) would help the IT team reduce the risk of data loss and meet SLAs. What Olvi didn’t realize was how easy it would be to meet SLAs, as long as the best-of-breed availability solution was in place.

Olvi had three requirements for an availability solution: It had to offer fast backup and recovery, conserve backup storage space and provide complete visibility of the virtual and backup environments for easy management and capacity planning.

“Our goal is to ensure IT systems are available 24x7 to our 250 users so the business can function efficiently,” said Jussi Ahomaa, ICT Manager at Olvi Oyj. “As our company grows, IT must be flexible and scalable to meet business demands.”

The Veeam Solution

Olvi chose Veeam Veeam Availability Suite for its Hyper-V environment, and meeting SLAs was no longer a challenge. Veeam is a reliable, affordable and easy-touse enterprise-class backup solution designed to provide high availability for small and medium businesses. Veeam met all of Olvi’s requirements: It offers fast backup and recovery, conserves backup storage space and provides complete visibility of the virtual and backup environments.

“It’s a very good feeling knowing we can rely on Veeam Availability Suite to meet SLAs,” Ahomaa said. “With Veeam, backup is 50% faster, recovery is 75% faster and backup files require 50% less storage. Moreover, with Veeam’s complete visibility, we’re aware of backup and performance issues before they impact operations.”

Veeam Availability Suite provides more than 25 Hyper-V recovery options, from whole VM recovery to granular restore. For example, Olvi uses Instant VM Recovery to restart a failed VM from a regular backup in minutes. Instant VM Recovery helps improve recovery time objectives (RTOs), minimise disruption to users and decrease downtime in production VMs. Olvi can also use a Veeam Explorer for granular recovery in backups of Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and SQL Server.

“If a user accidently deletes a file or individual item, we know we can recover it from a backup,” Ahomaa said.

Another Veeam feature that Olvi likes is SureBackup, which lets the IT team automatically test the recoverability of critical VM backups to improve recovery point objectives (RPOs) and reduce the risk of data loss.

“With SureBackup we can be certain that every operating system will boot and all the applications will run,” Ahomaa said. “Recoverability testing is done automatically at night, saving us time because we used to test manually before virtualisation.”

Veeam creates an isolated environment called a Virtual Lab where the IT team schedules recoverability testing of backups. Software updates and patches can also be tested in the Virtual Lab before they go into production. This feature is called On-Demand Sandbox.

In addition to providing fast backup and recovery, Veeam conserves backup storage space through built-in deduplication and compression. Veeam ensures that only data blocks not already present in the previous restore point are transferred across the network and checks the received blocks against other VM blocks already stored in the backup file. Therefore, Veeam provides global deduplication across all VMs included in the backup job.

Olvi’s third requirement was complete visibility into its virtual environment. With Veeam, the IT team identifies and resolves issues before they impact operations (and users). Complete visibility also helps with resource optimisation and capacity planning.

“Thanks to Veeam we no longer have over or under-allocated VMs,” Ahomaa explained. “We generate reports to identify unprotected VMs, track the status of backup and verification jobs and assess performance and utilisation. Veeam reporting gives us the full picture.”

The Results

Backup speed increases by 50%, recovery speed increases by 75%
Prior to virtualisation, Olvi’s IT Team found it difficult to meet SLAs because backing up and recovering failed physical servers was very slow, sometimes taking days. Olvi found the high availability solution it needed in Veeam Availability Suite. With significantly faster backup and recovery, meeting SLAs is easy.

Backup files require 50% less storage
Veeam Availability Suite has built-in deduplication and compression to make the most efficient use of backup storage. IT administrators can choose from four deduplication options and five levels of compression to improve storage performance.

Full visibility enables proactive issue resolution and optimisation
Veeam Availability Suite gives Olvi complete visibility of the virtual and backup environments through integrated monitoring, advanced alerting and automated reporting. With complete visibility, Olvi identifies and resolves issues quickly and knows ahead of time when backup disks are getting full. Veeam also analyses usage trends and offers provisioning recommendations for capacity planning.