Leng-d’Or ensures high availability and data protection for round-the-clock operations with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Leng-d’Or has offices and manufacturing plants distributed across three continents in addition to a centralized IT infrastructure. In January 2020, it adopted ERP SAP S4 HANA to manage its global operations, which is why it was necessary to change its backup and recovery solution given that the company was using Symantec Veritas backup, which did not offer integration with its new ERP.

Even though SAP HANA comes with its own backup system, it does not offer simple and granular access to transactions and tables from the ERP itself, in addition to the fact that it’s impossible to outsource this to meet the needs of Leng-d’Or, including support for its NetApp SAN and its virtualization requirements with VMware.

The company’s IT department is composed of only three people who offer support services to around 300 people. The manufacturing process never stops, and if, for whatever reason, the company loses access to the almost 15TB of business data (including those generated at remote locations), this could bring plant operations to a standstill, which would mean losing thousands of Euros per hour. This is why it is of utmost importance that the company has a reliable and robust infrastructure that allows it to guarantee that its business units have both availability and accessibility to data from the corporate network at all times, no matter if employees are working from home or at the company’s offices.

“Thanks to SAP HANA, we have managed to standardize everything, but we needed an additional layer to help consolidate all of this data in order to provide us with the robustness we were looking for,” said Enric Cuixeres, IT Manager at Leng-d’Or.

Cuixeres is well aware of the fact that if they hadn’t found a solution that offered the levels of integration and orchestration that Veeam offers, they would have had to acquire at least two backup solutions, one for SAP HANA and another specialist solution for virtual machines (VM).

The Veeam Solution

Contecnow, one of Veeam’s business partners, analyzed Leng-d’Or’s needs and presented the company with a proof of concept that showcased the scope of Veeam’s solution. From the very outset, Cuixeres could see that Veeam was the best option of all the options he evaluated because it met the company’s two major requirements: Integration with SAP HANA and support for the rest of the company’s technological infrastructure.

“Given that this solution offers a special plug-in for HANA, we can now orchestrate snapshots of the ERP databases, in addition to leveraging the granularity that it offers in recovering specific data from the system without having to restore everything. This is of strategic importance to us as the entire company’s operations are found on SAP. Likewise, the WAN accelerators that it has were also vital for the decision, since they facilitate the ability to backup the entire remote environment, both physical and virtual, minimizing the impact of the communications line. With the previous solution it was not possible to do centralized backup”, said Cuixeres.

There are numerous other features and characteristics of this Veeam solution that have kept the IT department at Leng-d’Or satisfied, including its ease-ofuse and the levels of consolidation it offers.

“The dashboard encompasses all of the company’s backup needs, and given its intuitive nature, shortens the learning curve. It shows us advances and status at all times, allowing us to recover specific data,” Cuixeres said. “Since there are only three of us in the IT department, this allows us to be more flexible and efficient in terms of managing both the backup and recovery processes.”

Cuixeres no longer needs to assign a member of his team to review the daily backup processes. which is something he had to do in the past, given that they are now fully automated. “We only need to manually use the solution if we want to recover specific data, a damaged VM, or if an employee accidentally deletes a file, meaning that the man-hour cost is virtually zero. In total, we are saving at least 30% of their time, which can then be used for other activities,” Cuixeres said, adding that since the company implemented Veeam, not only have they been able to better space-out backup activities, but the time spent on these processes has significantly dropped, all while maintaining 100% reliability of the backups.

According to Jordi Pera, IT infrastructure manager at Contecnow, one of the challenges of the implementation process was trying to improve the backup windows.

“With the previous solution, Leng-d’Or had problems on more than one occasion with completing a full backup of their environment. Thanks to Veeam, they no longer spend their weekends and holidays worrying about back-ups,” said Pera.

Given all these improvements, even though it’s difficult to know the specific number of resources that Leng-d’Or has saved thanks to Veeam, Cuixeres stated that these improvements are clearly visible as the company no longer has to dedicate man hours to detect any anomalies in the back-up process.

They also don’t have to use different backup tools for different platforms and systems or focus on incorporating the extra layer of security they needed to guarantee that, in the event of any problem, they could recover quickly and ensure business and operational continuity.

“Before Veeam, we were not able to offer the business areas the levels of response we would have wanted, but now, thanks to the granularity of Veeam and its integration with NetApp, we can undertake recovery processes pretty much straight away. Employees know that, in addition to offering them high data availability, their work will always be able to be recovered,” Cuixeres said, adding that, thanks to Veeam, they have improved their recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives (RPOs/RTOs) to the extent that data loss times are practically zero.

In conclusion, Cuixeres is certain that Veeam has had a positive impact on Leng-d’Or, allowing them to consolidate the IT system into a centralized and global model, guaranteeing advanced availability and preparing them to recover in the event of any serious issue.

The Results

• 100% reliability in backup processes, consolidated on one platform
  The main reason Leng-d’Or chose Veeam over the other options was the fact that it was the only solution that fully covers everything through one easyto- use and efficient application. Leng-d’Or has a 100% success rate for its backup execution processes.
• Speed and efficiency in execution, even as part of a distributed structu
  WAN accelerators allow the company to quickly execute backups on VMs found on distributed servers.
  “For example, a 70 GB VM from a decentralized Veeam backup site can be backed up in a maximum of five minutes,” said Cuixeres.
• More flexible and effective recovery processes thanks to Veeam’s granularity
  For the IT team at Leng-d’Or, granularity is the icing on the cake.
  “This feature was a wonderful surprise for us. Thanks to this granularity, we can recover specific data without having to restore everything, which means that we can be more flexible and offer better response times for our users,” said Cuixeres.