Veeam Helps Australian Paper Realise its Hyper-Availability Goals

The Business Challenge

With a history spanning 150 years, Australian Paper’s mission is underpinned by its commitment to creating sustainable growth for the next generation. The work of Australian Paper supports 5,786 direct and flow-out jobs Australian wide and contributes $900 million to Australia’s GDP.

To support the organisation’s mission, the hyper-availability of data and its retention is critical. With such a profound mission and commitment to sustainability, the organisation needs to be mindful of operational costs, and adjust spending accordingly.

Australian Paper was putting far too much into its legacy backup recovery solution, financially and in terms of resourcing. The solution did not align with Australian Paper’s needs and it became difficult to use.

Frank Braun, IT Operations & Infrastructure Manager at Australian Paper works with his internal team of five and external team at DXC Technology to deliver hyperavailability and IT infrastructure for the Australian Paper sites across Australia.

“After five years of working with our legacy solution, we discovered it was not aligned to our fundamental need for data retention, and what was initially provided at a discounted rate, was now limited in capacity and going to cost us more, about AU$60,000 for maintenance annually. Capacity expansion would incur additional costs for hardware and software licensing additionally to the annual maintenance. We needed a solution that would be simple and streamline our technology,” said Frank Braun.

The Veeam Solution

In searching for a solution to their challenges, Frank Braun considered a number of options, and sought advice from an IT consultant to find something less complex. TRT helped Australian Paper weigh up their options, landing on a perfect-fit solution of Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Edition with its QNAP storage infrastructure.

“The legacy backup solution was costing upwards of $270,000 over a five-year period, with no additional benefits. It was all proprietary too, which meant we would have to use specific brands of hardware if we needed more capacity, at an additional cost,” said Frank Braun.

“Cost, its notable simplicity, and features like compression and de-duplication were the main drivers for implementing Veeam. There was virtually no training required – a junior IT operator would be able to use this solution,” said Frank Braun.

Frank Braun noted, “When approaching the challenge of selecting a new availability solution, we needed to consider our existing technology solutions and ensure the new option was going to fit seamlessly and just feel right.”

Rocco Scaturchio, Regional Sales Manager - Oceania at TRT Solutions Ltd worked closely with Australian Paper to drive their digital transformation journey. They recognised the company needed a simple and cost-effective solution to integrate effortlessly in their existing IT environment.

“Australian Paper didn’t realise how time consuming its legacy solution backups were. Once they started using Veeam, they realised they didn’t need to create pages of documentation for others to follow recoveries. Veeam was much more intuitive and met all of their financial requirements too,” said Rocco Scaturchio.

“Veeam offers a much more flexible and cost-effective solution, fairing at $64,000 over five years, with no additional cost for maintenance, saving us a staggering total of $206,000 which can be better spent in other areas of the business, such as developing its operations and pursuing growth markets to achieve Australian Paper’s sustainability mission,” added Frank Braun.

“We have a total of 90 virtual machines (VMs), 10 of which contain critical business data on SharePoint, Exchange and File Server. The Veeam solution protects 70 terabytes of business-critical data, while only using 40 terabytes of storage,” affirms Frank Braun.

“Veeam has meant we are able to back up double the data in the same time and this is no longer impinging on other operations. Our server-state backups now have the ability to recover or duplicate a working server from a snapshot, incremental backups have allowed for a reduction in business disruption and the ability to create synthetic full backups from them,” adds Jim Mamatis, Wintel Infrastructure Manager at Australian Paper.

Since implementing Veeam, the Australia Paper team has also seen a notable difference in the speed at which they can recover data, ensuring their 1,250 employees suffer minimal interruptions in their day-to-day.

The Results

• Cost effective and simple hyper-availability solution for critical business data; saved AU$206,000 in five years
  “Another vendor proposed a similar solution as Veeam, however it was nowhere near as cost-efficient. At the end of the day, long term retention and data protection is what we require from our backup solution provider, and Veeam provides this, with the capacity to offer more and it does this seamlessly,” concluded Frank Braun.
• Reduced risk of data loss, ensuring high availability of critical data with reliable backup and restoration in minutes
  “It’s a lot easier to retrieve archived data. Where the legacy solution used to take between two to three hours to recover lost data, say, from a mailbox, Veeam can recover in minutes, improving overall productivity. What we have found to be superior about the Veeam solution is its Exchange and SharePoint backup databases. For file servers, anyone can do it and do it well. Exchange and SharePoint require a special type of capability and Veeam ticks the boxes here for a fast and reliable data recovery solution,” affirms Frank Braun.