Scania deploys Veeam Backup & Replication to improve virtualised disaster and backup recovery

'We can recover whole VMs, files and items almost instantly, despite data tripling during the last two years'

Scania Great Britain, part of truck manufacturer Scania Group, has selected Veeam Backup & Replication software in a bid to improve disaster recovery for its virtualised machines and applications.

The deployment was made to ensure 24/7 availability of systems for the company's 2,640 employees in the UK.

"Our dealers work almost all the time, so if they need a file restored, day or night, it must be restored fast," said Harley Carter, solutions architect for Scania Great Britain, who described how this wasn't possible with the previous set-up.

"File-level restore from tape could take hours, and since whole virtual-machine restore wasn't possible with the legacy backup tool, we had to rebuild VMs from scratch, which could take days."

Carter described Scania's legacy backup tool as "great for physical machine backup", but "a waste of time" when it came to virtualisation.

Under the old system it could take one week to prepare a disaster recovery test, something that Scania regarded as a poor use of time and resources.

The problem resulted in Carter looking for a solution to rebuild VMs and reconfigure applications to get them back up and running quickly. He spoke to peers in the industry, who pointed to Veeam as a potential answer. "They all recommended the same availability solution," he said.

That led Scania to deploy Veeam Backup & Replication in order to improve its disaster recovery testing facilities.

"We were never 100 per cent confident in disaster recovery with our legacy backup tool," Carter explained. "We worried about business continuity and didn't have peace of mind.

"With Veeam we're 100 per cent confident we can recover whatever we've backed up, giving us complete peace of mind. And, disaster recovery testing is so fast and simple that we can test as often as we want.

"Veeam more than paid for itself during the first disaster recovery test," he continued, adding how availability was there around the clock. "We can recover whole VMs, files and items almost instantly, despite our data tripling during the last two years," Carter added.

The deployment also led to the rollout of Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server for granular recovery, from backups of SQL Server. Carter said: "Instant VM recovery has saved the day for us at least once, and so has Veeam Explorer.

"Our BI system takes feeds from multiple databases and does bulk updates over the weekend. Data became corrupted in the system, but by the time we noticed it, the source files used to conduct the imports had been removed," he said, before describing how the deployment has improved backup and replication of data.

"Re-running jobs on the source systems can be intensive and we didn't want to do that during the daytime. So we pulled up one of the restore points in Veeam's Virtual Lab so that we didn't impact the live business-intelligence virtual machine, and used Veeam Explorer for SQL Server to recover data," Carter said.