Veeam Ensures Highly Availability of Global Systems

The Business Challenge

With high-quality clamping and connection solutions, the Oetiker Group has made an unmistakable name for itself in the global automotive market—a position that can only be strengthened by the fact that the company guarantees fast production cycles and short delivery times. To ensure an integrated flow of goods and information, Oetiker decided to deploy SAP across all locations at the end of 2012. The existing heterogeneous system landscape was replaced by a comprehensively integrated ERP and CRM system. As a result, end-to-end processes run more efficiently and more transparently.

With the modernisation of its data centre, Oetiker has an IT infrastructure that does justice to the international orientation of the group. The infrastructure is distributed across several locations and touches down with a VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) at the headquarters. Nearly 1,000 users access 100 virtual machines (VMs) in a 90% virtualised environment. The VMs run Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Storage includes HP StoreServ 7200 and HP ProLiant ML350 Gen 8.

“We have virtualised every business-critical application from our file, backup and exchange servers through to the domain controller and CAD programs,” said Lukas Boerlin, IT Manager Switzerland, Oetiker Group. “The scope of our physical servers, on the other hand, is very small because we have integrated almost all services into the virtual environment.”

The modernised data centre and new SAP environment brought about completely new challenges related to data backup and recovery. The previous backup solution covered the basic requirements of the virtual infrastructure, but was no longer powerful enough for the fully integrated and considerably more complex IT landscape. Before the introduction of SAP, recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPOs and RTOs) were not relevant for Oetiker. However, with the consolidation of the global infrastructure, a completely new service level had to be met. Oetiker had to guarantee the availability of data and systems 24 x7. A highperformance data protection solution to back up and recover the new landscape and ensure it was highly available was a necessity.

The Veeam Solution

Oetiker solved the new backup and recovery challenges by implementing Veeam® Backup & Replication™. Veeam provides Oetiker with user-friendly, highperformance and high-value data backup and recovery.

“In an elaborate selection procedure, we considered different providers, but Veeam Backup & Replication was simply unbeatable in terms of the enormous range of functions and the price-performance ratio,” explained Boerlin. Marcel Kistler, who supported the introduction of the new data backup solution at Oetiker on behalf of the IT consultancy firm Comicro-Netsys, said Veeam,cost approximately 25% of what a conventional data backup solution would have cost.

With Veeam, Oetiker’s IT team developed a backup system for its site in Horgen through which all VMs can be recovered within a matter of minutes in the case of disaster recovery (DR). For this purpose, the team operates two independent backup servers.

Oetiker relies on several Veeam features for item-level recovery including Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft SharePoint and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange. Lost emails are recovered by simply pressing a button.

“Veeam Explorer is a super function because it’s so easy to use,” said Boerlin. “For example, Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots offers fast recovery of VMs directly from HP StoreServ snapshots. With Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots, we’ve massively shortened backup time.”

In addition, Oetiker uses SureBackup® to check all backups for actual recoverability. Every backed file is started in an isolated environment and tested on the application level.

The Results

“The simplicity, clarity and uncomplicated implementation of Veeam should without a doubt be mentioned, Boerlin said. Thanks to these straightforward characteristics, extensive training was not required.”

Boerlin said being able to recover a VM in a very short time gives Veeam Backup & Replication an incomparable price-performance ratio. Veeam’s fast backup and recovery play a crucial role for Oetiker. With Veeam, Oetiker backs up more systems in one night than the previous backup tool, enabling the company to consolidate the number of backup jobs and harmonise all backup cycles across the company. As a result, Oetiker can carry out a backup of all systems at any time without affecting the production environment or users. Attaining and adhering to a new service level for data backup and recovery was not a problem for Oetiker’s IT team.

“Another bonus in Veeam Backup & Replication is Instant VM Recovery®, added Kistler. “It recovers a VM in a very short time. Recovering a VM with a conventional tool would take over four hours, but Oetiker can recover data and systems within a matter of minutes with Veeam.”

With Veeam, Oetiker’s virtualised data and applications are 100% backed up and completely recoverable at any tim—an indispensable prerequisite for ensuring reliable operations. Boerlin’s final verdict is unequivocal: “With Comicro as the implementation partner and the high-performance features of Veeam, we have simply made the best choice for our backup and recovery management.”