Flex picks Veeam to protect manufacturing for the world’s biggest brands

The Business Challenge

Flex designs and builds intelligent products for a smarter, more connected world. The company’s 20+ design centers and more than 100 manufacturing sites bring simplicity and efficiency to customers’ supply chains by helping them navigate complex global markets in highly competitive industries.

Flex works with customers in nearly every industry including automotive, health solutions, industrial, consumer, lifestyle and communications. A diverse customer base counts on Flex to design and build products that make the world a better place.

“Our priority is serving customers,” said Eyal Elyashar, Vice President of Information Systems for Flex in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). “One of the best ways to serve them is to make sure the IT systems supporting manufacturing are backed up and available. Several of our manufacturing sites operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but even just a few minutes of downtime could impact the production process and our ability to deliver products to customers.”

To avoid the risk of downtime, Elyashar and his colleagues pursued a disaster recovery (DR) strategy rooted in backup and replication at the virtual machine (VM) level; however, their legacy backup solutions were incapable of replication.

“They were also incapable of testing the validity of backups,” he said. “Backup integrity is indispensable to our company because recovering from a disaster quickly is critical to manufacturing, which directly impacts our customers. Since Veeam Backup & Replication offers features the legacy solutions lacked, the decision to partner with Veeam was easy.”

The Veeam Solution

Veeam helps Flex EMEA protect the IT systems supporting design and manufacturing. Veeam validates the recoverability of backups and replicas, recovers from them instantly, enables fast failover for DR and offers seamless cloud integration for modern data protection.

“Backup integrity was our goal, and that’s what Veeam provides,” Elyashar said. “Flex’s priority is serving customers, so Veeam protects the IT systems that manufacture their products.”

Flex’s proprietary IT systems include manufacturing execution for quality assurance, automatic assembly for efficiency, and automated pick-and-place machines equipped with Surface Mount Technology for precision. Microsoft SQL Server underpins these systems, making two Veeam recovery features especially advantageous: Instant VM Recovery to restore failed SQL databases quickly and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server for easy granular recovery.

“One of the biggest benefits of using Veeam is ease of use,” said Pavel Radu, EMEA IT Operations Lead at Flex. “The Veeam console centralizes and simplifies backup management, and SureBackup tests, validates and reports on recoverability.”

Elyashar said Veeam support is another big benefit.

“The level of support provided by Veeam’s sales team is amazing,” he explained. “Their responsiveness is excellent — they understand and answer every one of our needs. They do whatever it takes to help us be successful.”

Veeam backs up 1 PB across more than 1,000 VMs and 50 physical machines on-premises for fast, local recovery and replicates off-premises for high availability and DR.

A feature called Veeam Capacity Tier provides a simple way to tier backups to a variety of cloud object storage targets including AWS Storage, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and S3-compatible service providers.

“Veeam provides modern data protection, and for us that includes protecting archived backups in AWS deep storage,” Radu said.

The Results

• Tests and verifies the recoverability of backups and replicas
  Flex makes products that change people’s lives, so Veeam helps Flex EMEA protect the IT systems that support manufacturing. One of the features the IT team values most is SureBackup, which tests, verifies and reports on the recoverability of backups. SureReplica does the same for replicas.
• Delivers instant recovery and fast, efficient failover to DR sites
  One-click site failover orchestration with Veeam adds and arranges replica VMs in a pre-determined boot order, enabling Flex EMEA to remain resilient if there’s unexpected downtime.
• Enables easy cloud integration and tiering to AWS Storage services
  Veeam Capacity Tier automatically tiers older backups to object storage to free up local storage. Capacity Tier also offers features to reduce overall storage consumption and lower ingress and egress costs.