“I think most of the IT team would agree that our favorite Veeam feature is seamless integration with HP StoreVirtual. I believe this integration will be one of the most useful aspects of our IT infrastructure.” — Jan Spapens, Senior Program Manager, Technology Enterprise Solutions
The Business Challenge
Vodafone Netherlands operates in a dynamic and competitive environment that requires fast adaptation to customers’ changing needs. To automate business operations such as telecommunications delivery, customer support and billing, Vodafone virtualized the IT infrastructure on VMware vSphere. However, protecting the production environment became more difficult as the infrastructure approached 90% virtualization and the number of virtual machines (VMs) increased. At the same time, yet unrelated to virtualization, the customer base grew and data tripled. Vodafone’s legacy backup and monitoring tools couldn’t keep pace, resulting in slow backup and recovery.
The vSphere environment has hundreds of VMs spread across multiple data centers in the Netherlands that run Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Zend Server and a proprietary back-office portal and service navigator. HP ProLiant servers host HP StoreVirtual VSA storage.
“Only a limited number of VMs could be backed up daily, and they were strictly production VMs,” said Jan Spapens, Senior Program Manager, Technology Enterprise Solutions, Vodafone Netherlands. “Backup jobs failed about once a month, requiring us to spend time trying to access our backups. We had no easy way to perform file-level recovery and no clear way to monitor unprotected VMs.”
Vodafone put together a list of requirements for data protection and VM management, and Nikola Stojanovski, Technical Specialist, Vodafone Netherlands, reviewed several backup solutions to find the right match.
“Veeam was a perfect fit for us,” Stojanovski explained. “We needed the best data protection for our production environment, and Veeam offers frequent and reliable backup, storage integration, a smaller storage footprint, high-speed recovery, replication for failover and improved monitoring and reporting. We didn’t have to make any hardware investments, and Veeam integrates seamlessly with HP StoreVirtual.”
