Carrefour offers a better shopping experience with Veeam

Quality, service and availability are the attributes that Carrefour prioritizes in each of its branches internationally. This ethos has led the group to become the eighth largest retailer in the world. In Argentina, Carrefour has more than 600 stores, and operates its own distribution centers all day every day to maintain the high standards of the brand.

“We want our customers to have an excellent shopping experience whenever they visit our stores,” said Gustavo Actis, Head of Platforms, Databases, Infrastructure and Cloud Computing at Carrefour Argentina. “So, our distribution centers never stop; they operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And to support the complex logistics involved, they rely on constant access to data. In the same way, we guarantee this smooth experience to visitors to our e-commerce sites. So, we need to ensure the underlying IT systems are always available and up to date.”

When Carrefour Argentina initiated a digital transformation program, it saw an opportunity to improve its approach to data protection. With the company centralizing and streamlining its IT infrastructure and supporting tools, it decided to adopt a solution to manage the backup and restore of data for its virtualized infrastructure.

“We are users of data backup tools such as IBM Spectrum to protect our IBM Power Systems infrastructure,” said Actis. “However, we decided during an end-to-end review of our IT environment that it was time to analyze the data protection market and find out if there was a better option out there for VMware environments. Since we were moving to a fully virtualized landscape and taking our first steps into the cloud, we looked for a tool that could help us on that journey.”

Carrefour Argentina chose Veeam to enable data availability for its stores and distribution centers, helping the retailer continue to provide superb customer experiences. 

“The first thing that attracted us to Veeam was the many positive references,” said Carlos Díaz, Administrator, Platform Infrastructure at Carrefour Argentina. “In addition, Veeam integrates seamlessly with many other technologies, which is ideal since our environment spans IBM AIX, Windows, Linux and VMware, hosted on-premises and in the Google Cloud. Veeam compares favorably with IBM Spectrum because of the agentless backup feature, making it perfect for virtualized environments like ours with many VMs. Finally, the ease of restoring data with Veeam was a huge selling point.”

As part of the selection process, Carrefour Argentina opted to conduct a proof-of-concept (PoC) exercise to test out the Veeam capabilities. These capabilities were put to the test when the company lost a mission-critical server during the PoC

“Coincidentally, one of our most essential Active Directory servers failed while we were running the Veeam PoC,” said Gabriel Dettano, Platform Infrastructure Manager at Carrefour Argentina. “We made the decision to restore the server with the test backup system, which together with the snapshots we’d taken using Veeam brought the server back online in less than an hour. It’s no exaggeration to say that Veeam saved the day and demonstrated just how valuable Veeam would be to our business.”

Carrefour Argentina now backs up 100% of the data for its virtualized systems using Veeam. The company performs incremental backups every day, a full backup weekly and at weekends, plus a few additional backups of specific workloads every six months. Through Veeam, Carrefour Argentina has a central point of control and visibility of all its backup policies and how they are being applied.

“Even though we’re backing up more data with Veeam, we’ve cut our backup windows from hours to just minutes in many cases,” said Actis. “In addition, with IT Monitoring and Analytics by Veeam we have now got unprecedented insight into our infrastructure. It helps us spot opportunities to improve our infrastructure planning. We can also take more risks with development, since we’re confident we can always roll back our environment using Veeam snapshots.”

Veeam is adding another layer of protection to Carrefour Argentina’s cyber resilience strategy, helping the company to ensure it can recover quickly from an attack.  

• Supports outstanding shopper experiences by enabling 100% end-to-end protection of Carrefour Argentina’s data.
  “Thanks to Veeam we can now confidently say that all our data is backed up and we have a 100% backup success rate,” said Actis. “We want every customer who visits Carrefour in Argentina to leave with a smile on their face — and protecting our data with Veeam is helping us to achieve that goal.” 
• Cut backup windows from hours to just 30 minutes, reducing the risk of disruption to distribution or sales processes.
  By limiting backup windows and accelerating data restore times, Carrefour Argentina enables exceptional service continuity.
• Transforms the efficiency of backup operations through a central point of control, freeing up time for innovation.
  “We used to have a whole squad of people responsible for backups,” said Actis. “Veeam gives us much more comprehensive data protection capabilities that can be managed through a single console. We save resources that can be focused on guiding Carrefour Argentina through the next phase of our digital transformation.”