Welch’s Harvests Data Protection with Veeam for Reliable Recovery in any DR Situation

The Business Challenge

Welch’s manufactures its products 24x7. In the fall, farmers in the National Grape Cooperative harvest their grapes and deliver them to Welch’s at any time—day or night. If there’s a problem with Welch’s IT infrastructure during this time, delivery trucks might be backed up for miles, which would affect the intake process and other company operations.

To ensure an “always-on” business for continuity and to maintain peak performance of the IT infrastructure, Welch’s conducts disaster recovery (DR) testing throughout the year. Critical applications and data must be recoverable within four hours, including domain controllers, Microsoft SQL, Exchange and SharePoint. These applications and data run on nearly 200 VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs).

When VM recovery became more complicated and drawn out than the IT team felt was feasible, Welch’s looked for faster, more reliable recovery options. The team’s goal was to find a feature-rich backup and recovery solution to streamline DR processes. The team wanted a cost-effective, easy-to-use solution that did not require expensive agents like the previous tool.

Team members had heard about Veeam® Backup & Replication™ from peers at user groups and tradeshows, so they contacted Focus Technology Solutions, Inc., an enterprise-level technology solutions provider, for an opinion about Veeam. Welch’s and Focus have worked together for years. Focus agreed that Veeam was Welch’s best choice for DR.

The Veeam Solution

Veeam Backup & Replication provides powerful, easy to use, backup, recovery and replication features that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center™ to support Welch’s DR strategy and enable an always-on business. Recovery speed and reliability improved dramatically when Welch’s deployed Veeam Backup & Replication.

“We chose Veeam because it offers recovery features for any DR situation,” said Patrick Hancock, Senior IT Analyst at Welch’s. “Veeam deploys easily, adapts to any vSphere configuration and is several steps ahead of its competitors capability-wise. Our business requires frequent DR testing; Veeam has the replication and recovery features to support our testing.”

Two of Veeam’s most important recovery features for Welch’s are SureBackup® and SureReplica, which verify the recoverability of every backup and every replica.

Veeam automatically starts a backup or replica in an isolated environment called Virtual Lab, performs tests against the backup or replica and creates a report on its state and condition. Welch’s randomly tests backups and replicas for all critical VMs, including the VM that contains the company’s recipes.

To recover recipes in minutes, Welch’s uses Veeam to gain instant visibility into backups and restore items quickly. Welch’s also uses Veeam to recover emails in Microsoft Exchange, files in SharePoint and user accounts in Active Directory.

George Scangas, Manager of IT Architecture at Welch’s, said there’s another reason he and Hancock chose Veeam: It’s a mature solution that gets better with each new release—from Built-in WAN Acceleration (to save time and money when moving backups off site) to Backup from Storage Snapshots (to improve recovery point objectives) to native tape support (for offsite backup archiving).

With frequent DR testing, Welch’s depends on innovative new features in Veeam to streamline DR.

“Before we began using Veeam, DR testing could take nearly two days because of recovery problems and numerous calls to the vendor for technical support,” Scangas said. “Because Veeam is so easy to use and offers so many recovery options, DR testing now takes just a few hours. Veeam recovery is so fast and straightforward that we don’t even need to be on site for testing anymore, which saves us time and travel.

“Veeam is way ahead of its competitors,” Scangas continued. “Competitors’ new releases have features that Veeam already introduced a few releases back. We always look forward to seeing what innovative recovery capabilities Veeam will add to each new release, and how they will help raise the bar on DR.”

The Results

Delivers fast VM and granular recovery
When Welch’s experienced slow, unreliable recovery, the company’s IT team switched to Veeam Backup & Replication. From a single image-based backup, Veeam provides high-speed recovery of VMs, OS files and applications s through its agentless, easy-to-use and wizard-driven user interface.

Verifies recoverability of every backup and replica
Backups and replicas are worth nothing unless they are recoverable. To guarantee recoverability of its data, Welch’s relies on Veeam Backup & Replication to verify that every critical backup and replica can be recovered every time.

Supports frequent DR testing and an always-on business
Each time Veeam Software releases a new version of Veeam Backup & Replication, customers can count on three things: innovation, features and performance. Competitors’ new releases have features that Veeam already introduced a few releases back. Welch’s counts on new capabilities in Veeam releases that will augment recovery during frequent DR testing.