FEATURE
Corporation set out to build a highly available
IT infrastructure.
Gert Prinsloo, Infrastructure Manager at Industrial
Development Corporation, explains that the institution
implemented various replication solutions in the hope
of building a highly available environment for critical
applications, operating systems, and storage. They also
implemented different monitoring products for server and
storage capacity planning. “In the end, what we thought
was giving us high availability was fighting against us.”
Some of the pain points included, time required to
manage siloed infrastructure, slow backup and recovery
and non-existent visibility into relationships between
virtual and physical resources. The recovery time and
point objectives of 48 hours, was unacceptable for
an organisation that was expected to be always-on.
When asked by the CEO if the decision-making data
is available, Prinsloo could not guarantee continuous
availability. “Our siloed approach to high availability
was holding us back.”
By bringing in Veeam solutions, Industrial Development
Corporation was able to get back on track for its digital
transformation strategy. Veeam solutions replaced
products previously used for virtual machine backup,
replication and monitoring, enabling the removal
of silos. The Industrial Development Corporation
succeeded in simplifying virtualisation management and
saved $374,000 in product and licensing costs, as well as
thousands of hours in troubleshooting time.
Next Veeam helped optimise resources and manage the
data centre spend. Instead of replacing 400TB of old
but not obsolete storage, the Industrial Development
moved through the Internet connection.
With the comparatively higher latency
as well as significant costs of high speed
data transfer connections in Africa, this
could be a time-consuming operation
and hence a significant inhibitor.
Petersen also points to end-users
transferring the initial image of the
virtual machine by alternative methods
to the remote site and then updating it
periodically. “Once the initial replication
is done of the large amount of data
then it is very quick, because you
are only going to replicate the daily
changes across the network.”
The lack of technical skills to manage
such disaster recovery solutions in
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Corporation repurposed it as backup storage because
Veeam is storage-agnostic, saving $882,000. They were
also able to integrate Veeam backup and replication
with the aging production storage on Hewlett Packard
Enterprise 3PAR StoreServ. The Veeam solution can now
backup, replicate, and recover from HPE 3 PAR StoreServ
snapshots reducing the recovery time and point
objective to 15 minutes.
Prinsloo gives another example, when one of the
virtual machines supporting Industrial Development
Corporation’s core SAP business application failed.
Various modules inside Veeam Availability Suite
including Instant VM Recovery, SureBackup, and
SureReplica, were used to verify the integrity of the
virtual machine before replication within minutes. In
another real-life example, a desktop client was restored
using Veeam solution when it was locked due to
ransomware. “We had him back online quickly without
paying ransom and without losing data.”
Veeam’s sandbox environment called Virtual Lab is
also used by team members to test software patches
before putting them into production. “Being able to test
patches quickly and easily with Veeam helps us protect
the business and our users from being impacted,” he
points out. “When we are confident a software patch
will not affect a production virtual machine, we take a
snapshot of the virtual machine first for safety.”
Over a five-year period, Veeam has saved the
company $1.3 million. Veeam has helped guide a data
centre refresh to create a simpler but more advanced
and future-ready IT infrastructure. It has brought
visibility into the relationships between physical and
virtual resources.
a timely and cost effective way, is
also driving the opportunity for entry
of managed service providers in Africa.
This is promoting Veeam to encourage
its channel partners in Africa to gain
suitable certification to start their
own managed services built on
Veeam solutions.
“We encourage our partners to become
Veeam Certified Engineers so that they
can do their own installations. This is
very important for us. The good thing
about Veeam is that it is a very simple
and easy product to implement in a
day or two, and your customers can
be up and running performing a local
backup. Once the local backups are
running you can discuss the disaster
recovery strategy,” says Petersen.
The opportunity to deliver managed
services in Africa, is also drawing in the
entry of global system integrators. “You
find big system integrators are doing
very well in terms of managed services.
They manage infrastructure onsite and
offsite providing disaster recovery as a
service,” continues Petersen.
Globally and in Africa the adoption
trends are quite similar. Small and
medium based businesses are more
readily adopting cloud based, disaster
recovery solutions, than larger
enterprises. This an additional reason
for Veeam channel partners to address
disaster recovery solution opportunities
in African markets.
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