Les Fermes de Gally secures its most critical systems with Veeam and Hexanet

The Business Challenge

The aging infrastructure at Les Fermes de Gally was becoming unreliable, causing breaks in production lasting six to eight hours. These were having a significant negative impact on business activities, particularly when the interruptions affected the company’s three key services: accounting, client invoicing and payroll. The organization wanted to provide additional resilience for these systems, including better arrangements for backup and recovery.

Frédéric Prevost, Manager, IT and Telecoms, Les Fermes de Gally, said: “We were planning a project to fully externalize our backup, but in the meantime, we needed to focus on refreshing our IT infrastructure. We therefore set up a temporary solution: Once a month, we connected a NAS device to our data center for a full backup, then moved the NAS to a different building. Of course, the recovery point objective (RPO) was far from optimal.”

Les Fermes de Gally looked for an external service provider that used Veeam, as this was its internally chosen technology for backing up virtual servers. In addition to finding a competitively priced service for a fully externalized disaster recovery (DR) solution, Les Fermes de Gally wanted a partner that could use the existing 16TB of backed-up data on the NAS as the starting point for incremental remote backups.

The Veeam Solution

Les Fermes de Gally was working with Hexanet — a leading French IT infrastructure specialist — to refresh its Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, and had extended this engagement to cover the migration of its email to Microsoft 365.

“Unlike most of the providers we contacted, including the major global cloud providers, Hexanet was completely comfortable with bringing our existing NAS backup into their network,” said Prevost. “Their technical skills around Veeam and our shared business values made them the perfect partner for externalizing our DR. For Les Fermes de Gally, Hexanet is a partner that is fully compatible with our corporate identity.”

Selecting Hexanet as a one-stop shop for both its infrastructure and its DR also enabled Les Fermes de Gally to keep everything within its MPLS network.

“This completely integrated approach enabled us to avoid setting up VPN tunnels for the backup data streams,” said Prevost. “Better still, we were able to set up a full Veeam Cloud Connect solution — it’s no longer just externalized backup, but also full replication of our virtual machines (VMs).”

Les Fermes de Gally replicates 12 VMs supporting its most critical services every 24 hours, enabling full recovery time objective (RTO) within two to six hours.

“Initially, adopting the new solution raised some questions around the management backup windows. The ongoing support is very much appreciated, helping us to ensure that our most important systems are protected against unexpected downtime or loss of data.”

By externalizing the existing Veeam backup arrangements and adding in Veeam Cloud Connect for replication, Les Fermes de Gally was able to follow its preferred approach around sustainability and re-use of existing investment. The company aims to keep its supply chain as short as possible and work with local suppliers — another strong point for choosing Hexanet as its solution provider.

The Results

• Simple yet powerful solution
  “Setting up the new solution was simple, as is the ongoing daily management since Hexanet accesses our Veeam console and sees the same things we do. We are very satisfied with the Veeam solution for backup both internally and externally,” said Prevost.
• Setting the standard for backup
  “Why Veeam? Because, quite simply, it’s the reference point for backing up virtualized infrastructures. In addition, the WAN Acceleration functionality is a major benefit in getting our different backup jobs to work well together,” said Prevost.
• Reliable replication for full protection
  “The anticipated timelines for recovery are completely manageable for the business and already represent a clear improvement versus what we were doing in the past. Fortunately, we’ve never needed to use the solution to recover from a genuine disaster. But in DR testing, all the data was correctly replicated and recoverable,” said Prevost.