Yusen Logistics Americas Meets RTO/RPO with Veeam + Cisco HyperFlex, Saving $300,000 Every 10 Minutes in Downtime

The Business Challenge

Yusen Logistics Americas provides shippers of all sizes with a portfolio of services designed to manage their complex and ever-changing supply chains. The company optimizes cargo transportation and distribution for some of the nation’s largest companies including Target and Walmart. Both retailers have recognized Yusen Logistics Americas as partner of the year for extraordinary commitment during peak seasons.

Yusen Logistics Americas deals with a lot of data (1.1 PBs on 600 virtual machines) in three critical, interdependent systems: IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, which receives and processes customers’ orders, a proprietary warehouse management system that fulfills orders, and a bespoke transportation management system that coordinates shipment and delivery.

Slow, unstable backup and recovery threatened availability of these critical systems, despite the IT team spending nearly 600 hours trying to resolve the problems. Jermaine Wells, Senior System Engineer at Yusen Logistics Americas, said meeting both recovery time and point objectives (RTO/RPO) was possible only 50 percent of the time.

“We have to meet recovery objectives 100 percent of the time,” Wells said. “If our systems aren’t available, the business won’t run efficiently, and if the business doesn’t run efficiently, we risk losing customers. We calculated the cost of downtime, and it’s $300,000 every 10 minutes.”

The Veeam Solution

Yusen Logistics Americas replaced legacy backup with Veeam Backup & Replication.

“Veeam was the obvious choice,” Wells said. “It’s the best availability solution on the market, and the integration between Veeam and our Cisco HyperFlex infrastructure is outstanding.”

Veeam and Cisco have worked together to address the needs of their mutual customers since 2013. Veeam added snapshot integration to the Cisco HyperFlex platform in 2017, which enables lower RPOs without impacting production systems.

“We’re meeting RTO and RPO 100 percent of the time, and that’s because of the deep integration between Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex,” Wells said. “They give us a level of confidence and business resiliency we’ve never had before.”

Veeam backs up, replicates and recovers from storage snapshots, increasing speeds by up to 60 percent. Veeam’s SureBackup and SureReplica verify the recoverability of backups and replicas, and Virtual Lab lets the IT team test software code, patches and updates before putting them into production.

“Veeam complements Cisco HyperFlex to improve data protection of the systems that sustain our business,” Wells said. “When we had performance issues with B2B Sterling Integrator and the warehouse management system, our development team tested code in Virtual Lab to resolve the issues quickly. Before we deployed Veeam, they had to build clones of virtual machines before they could test anything, and that was time-consuming. Veeam is our Superman. It simplifies data protection and saves tremendous time.”

Wells said members of the IT team took turns protecting data before Veeam was deployed. One person spent five hours each day rerunning failed backups and recovering data.

“Veeam is totally different because backups rarely fail, and if we need to recover data, it takes minutes. Data protection is 98 percent faster and so much easier with Veeam, giving us time to update current systems and deploy new ones like Microsoft Office 365.”

Wells said data migration is fast and easy too.

“Veeam replicated 400 production virtual machines from one colocation center to another in record time and with zero impact on the business,” Wells said. “I can’t imagine how long migration would have taken with legacy backup. Veeam is the best availability solution for Cisco HyperFlex.”

The Results

• Meets recovery objectives 100 percent of the time
  Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex help Yusen Logistics Americas protect the business-critical systems that underpin its end-to-end supply chain solutions for the nation’s largest companies.
• Supports business resiliency and continuity
  “Meeting RTO and RPO 100 percent of the time means we can ensure business resiliency and continuity 100 percent of the time,” Wells said. “That wasn’t possible before Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex.”
• Reduces time spent protecting data by 98 percent
  Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex bring the power of hyperconvergence to data protection, making it fast, easy and seamless for Yusen Logistics Americas. The IT team spends its newfound time upgrading systems and deploying new ones including Microsoft Office 365.