LAZZEN provides reliable and efficient smart power solutions backed by Veeam’s comprehensive data resilience

Founded in 1999, Shanghai Liangxin (LAZZEN) is leading the way in the smart power sector, with its services being available in more than 140 large cities in China and over 30 countries around the world.

LAZZEN’s daily operations and services rely on digital systems. Its smart power solutions require reliable IT infrastructure to provide quality services, while its fully automated factory in Zhejiang needs undisrupted systems to enable smooth production. With this in mind, business continuity is one of the top priorities for LAZZEN.

“Our power distribution system has to be online 24/7, and production would halt in our smart factory if there was downtime of one system. To ensure business continuity, we need comprehensive data backup, so that our systems can recover quickly when incidents occur,” said Manager Xu, IT Infrastructure Director at LAZZEN.

Most of LAZZEN’s internal operations are supported by its IT department and its systems are deployed in a hybrid cloud environment. Customer-related services are run in a public cloud, and manufacturing-related services are in four datacenters across Shanghai and Zhejiang. LAZZEN’s on-premises infrastructure is comprised of 370 servers -- VMware and Nutanix AHV virtual machines (VMs) -- along with SQL Server and Oracle database clusters. Relying on both the x86 and AIX computing environments adds to its architectural complexity.

LAZZEN previously used a third-party solution and tape drives to protect their data. However, as LAZZEN’s business grew and the software they had been using was updated, their previous solution gradually fell short of LAZZEN’s needs. Not only was it not compatible with newer technologies like VMs and containers, but effective measures against complex ransomware attacks were also missing. As a result, LAZZEN was unable to fully back up its IT business, putting their business continuity at stake. For example, in 2016, LAZZEN saw part of its infrastructure go down for half a month following a ransomware attack.

More recently, LAZZEN’s fully automated factory that was established in 2022 didn’t have a data protection system, which made it prone to data loss and operational disruption. To be certified by the Chinese government as a future factory, LAZZEN’s factory needed to meet security requirements, like ISO27000. To ensure its operational stability and its factory’s undisrupted production, LAZZEN had to look for a more powerful data backup and recovery solution. 

After six months of reviewing solutions, LAZZEN chose Veeam to replace its legacy solution. Now, Veeam is the backup platform of choice for LAZZEN’s IT business system and fully automated factory.

“We wanted to employ the same data backup solution across all our systems to streamline management. That’s why we spent quite some time comparing and testing various products,” said Xu. “Veeam had a great advantage over other offerings, delivering the best performance in compatibility, backup efficiency, and hardware adaptability.”

Since Veeam can be seamlessly integrated with the VM and container solutions that LAZZEN heavily relies on. LAZZEN can now back up all its data more effortlessly to one single platform. Prior to adopting Veeam, LAZZEN had to install an agent in each system to enable cross-platform backup, which required dedicated staff in each department. Now with Veeam, only one engineer in each datacenter site is needed to cover all the backup workload of LAZZEN’s IT business.

Furthermore, Veeam helped LAZZEN reduce its recovery time objectives (RTOs) from four hours to just minutes, which enabled quick system recovery and effectively enhanced the company’s business continuity. For example, LAZZEN’s manufacturing automation system once encountered an error. By leveraging Veeam to execute cross-platform recovery, it took the team only 15 minutes to bring the system back online. Previously this would have taken 4 hours.

As a manufacturer, LAZZEN holds a lot of production-related data that needs backup. Since Veeam provides high hardware adaptability and supports repetitive data deletion and more effective data compression, LAZZEN can control its storage hardware cost more easily. During product reviewing, the LAZZEN team found that compared to other offerings, Veeam requires 50% lower storage hardware costs.

Xu points out that Veeam improved LAZZEN’s data backup capabilities on multiple fronts by enabling features such as retention policy settings, flexible I/O configuration for smoother business operations during backup, and daily backup status reports for greater visibility.

“Veeam helped us improve performance when it comes to ensuring effective backup and recovery. It’s also reduced related labor and hardware costs, which means that our critical systems are always online in the most cost-effective way,” he added.

Having seen the excellent results brought by Veeam’s solution, LAZZEN plans to take full advantage of Veeam to reinforce its backup security with cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) while conducting real-time analytics of their backup data for resource optimization.

“Since we started partnering with Veeam, we have been receiving extensive technical support and training, so that we can effectively use Veeam solutions to improve data security and business continuity and provide reliable smart power solutions to our customers. Next, we will continue to deepen our use of Veeam’s data protection capabilities to ensure smooth operations for our IT business systems and automated factory,” said Xu.

• Supports seamless integration with virtual infrastructure platforms to reduce data backup workloads
  Veeam can be seamlessly integrated with the VM and container solutions that LAZZEN heavily relies on, eliminating the need for agent installations on different systems.
• Shortens reduce recovery time objectives (RTOs) by 70% to enable fast business recovery
  Veeam helps LAZZEN shorten RTOs from four hours to just minutes, enabling quick system recovery and effectively enhancing business continuity. It only took LAZZEN 15 minutes to recover its manufacturing automation system when an error occurred.
• Offers high hardware adaptability to reduce storage hardware costs by 50%
  Veeam provides high hardware adaptability and supports repetitive data deletion and more effective data compression, enabling LAZZEN to control its storage hardware costs more easily.