Business Diversification and Growth Driven by Veeam and ExaGrid

The Business Challenge

Carglass had identified the home repair market as one in which it could utilize its skills and expertise in order to bring value to both end user clients and insurance partners through the provision of a branded, high quality service solution. This acquisition of Maisoning represents Belron’s first foray into the home repair market in Europe. The Carglass Maison network is made up of 25 branches and employs 469 people across France, including 208 construction workers and technicians.

In response to the evolution of its business, Carglass deployed a new IT infrastructure on two extended WLAN data centers at the beginning of 2018. With this, Carglass’ objective was to have a robust infrastructure to support the evolution of its business and ensure the Availability of its critical data and applications. This new infrastructure was to house the infrastructure for the new Carglass Maison business, as well as the company’s main ERP, previously hosted by Carglass’ headquarters in the United Kingdom. The new markets opened through the acquisition also meant an examination of the backup strategy was due in order to meet the growing needs of the business.

“We’re a global company, which means candidates are submitting their data to us 24/7, and employers are accessing our reports that verify data 24/7,” Peterson said. “If we experience downtime, we’re doing a disservice to everyone involved, and it affects not only our bottom line, but also our reputation.”

Slow backup and recovery can place HireRight’s IT systems at risk for downtime and may also present compliance challenges. With the Fair Credit Reporting Act in the United States providing candidates certain report request and dispute rights, and the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) on the horizon in the European Union where candidates are also provided access and correction rights, system stability is a necessity for compliance.

The Veeam Solution

Historically, Carglass used to back up its data to LTO tape using Veeam. Faced with increasing backup windows and a lack of storage space that had become problematic given the company’s new needs, the IT team decided to move toward a data deduplication and replication system that would maximise Veeam’s backup and recovery performance.

Satisfied with Veeam’s track record, Carglass’ IT department wanted to continue relying on the world leader in Cloud Data Management to back up and restore its critical data. “Data Availability is a key issue for Carglass, as we must meet the compliance requirements set by the group. Veeam is the world leader in this field and there is no competitor that provides the same quality for an equivalent price,” explains Vincent Dominguez, Infrastructure Engineer at Carglass. Carglass has been using Veeam Backup & Replication for many years to back up its virtualized infrastructure under VMware, amounting to 300 VMs and 30 TB of data — including the protection of business application servers such as accounting and SQL databases. “If this data became unavailable, the company would no longer be able to invoice its customers, resulting in revenue losses estimated two million Euros for just 24 hours of service interruption”, adds Dominguez. This is a particularly crucial point for Carglass, as the company seeks to continue providing a high quality of service while building a strong reputation for itself on the home repair business. “We inherited Maisoning’s infrastructure at the time of the acquisition, which included 50 VM for an additional data volume of 12 TB. We have migrated these VMs to our new infrastructure where we are confident that we can restore data quickly and easily.”

By combining Veeam with ExaGrid, IT has seen many additional benefits, including faster backups and restores. Backups now take seven hours, where previously it took the IT team 12 hours to back up all the data — a time saving window of 42%. In addition, the company sees better data retention. With Veeam Data Mover and ExaGrid’s landing zone system, backup processing, deduplication and compression are seamlessly performed directly on ExaGrid deduplication appliances, which accelerates Veeam’s backup performance. In addition, Veeam offers Carglass excellent recovery performance — up to 24 times faster — while recovering a VM could take up to two hours, it now takes on average between five and 10 minutes. This, combined with longer backup data retention times, gives IT peace of mind in case an accident should happen. Dominguez states, “Carglass is now able to retain backed up data for longer, up to 31 days, meaning the team can recover older data if needs be. Previously, the maximum retention period for the data was one week.”

Carglass have also realized further benefits of the joint solution in that’s it’s a very intuitive, clear and easy-to-use product that facilitates IT’s day-to-day work and ensures the efficient management and Availability of company data. “The native integration between Veeam and ExaGrid allows us to achieve optimal solution performance, thus ensuring better data protection and a higher quality of service, which are crucial to the diversification of our business,” says Vincent Dominguez.

The Results

• Protection of millions of Euros in revenue streams
  Unavailable and interrupted data means the company would no longer be able to invoice its customers, resulting in revenue losses estimated at two million Euros for just 24 hours of service interruption.
• 42% reduction in backup windows
  The integration of Veeam and ExaGrid means backups are performed using raw data, and a full backup now takes seven hours, where previously it took the IT team 12 hours to back up all the data.
• VM recovery up to 24 times faster
  Recovering a VM takes on average between five and 10 minutes and recovering a user file is almost instantaneous. Before that the complete recovery of a VM could take up to two hours.