The Business Challenge

As Sibur-Khimprom moved from a physical to virtual infrastructure, the IT team faced the challenge of choosing the right data protection and disaster recovery solution. “We knew we could lose critical data unless we chose the right solution,” explained Ruslan Karimov, Chief Information Officer. “The backup software we used before could perform backups only with the help of an agent deployed inside the guest operating system of a virtual machine.”

The Veeam Solution

In order to find the best data protection and disaster recovery solution, the IT team tested a number of backup tools from different vendors in a dedicated VMware environment. Veeam Backup & Replication demonstrated the best results.

“Veeam’s backup solution provides data deduplication, allows for backing up and replicating virtual machines, and does not require any agents inside the guest operating systems. These were the strongest key features that influenced our decision,” Ruslan added.

Another important factor the company considered was cost. Veeam is licensed per CPU socket, making the cost of backing up the infrastructure more predictable than other solutions. Furthermore, Veeam Backup & Replication was 30 percent less expensive than the company’s previous backup software.

The Results

The IT team performed a number of thorough tests to determine the possibilities that Veeam Backup & Replication provides. Later, this helped team members install and configure the solution quickly and easily, without any problems.

“Veeam Backup & Replication gave us a number of serious advantages over the software we used before,” Ruslan explained.

• With Changed Block Tracking, backups are much faster; the backup window shrank by 80 percent—from 10 hours to two hours.
• Data deduplication saved on storage space and cost; now the company needs three times less disk space for storing backup files

Replication helped create a disaster recovery site that can be used in case of problems with the production data center.

• Software costs decreased by 30 percent because of Veeam’s licensing model.
• Intuitive user interface allows the IT team to perform backups with just a few mouse clicks.