Olímpica slashes backup times by 77% with Veeam

From its roots in Baranquilla, Olímpica has grown into the third largest company in the Colombian Caribbean. Along the way, the retail conglomerate launched a wide range of own-brand products and expanded across Colombia.

“We open about 30 new locations annually and we currently have 413 sites,” said Grace Aguirre, IT Networks and Communications Coordinator at Olímpica. “Each new location increases the number of transactions we process each day and increases the volume of data that we generate, store and analyze.”

Olímpica is committed to offering its customers competitive prices for high-quality goods. To deliver on this promise, the retailer manages its back-office operations using applications for document management, electronic invoicing, antivirus and more. Hosted at a primary datacenter on site, this software plays an essential role in keeping shelves stocked and supporting company growth.

“We aim to maintain a real-time view of data from all our locations,” said Omar Villamil, IT Manager at Olímpica. “However, keeping our back-office systems synchronized and guarding against data loss was a challenge, especially as we added new stores.”

As Olímpica expanded, its data protection measures struggled to deliver the high availability required to keep the company’s retail network running smoothly. Backups were exceeding overnight windows, and the time and effort it took to restore data limited the retailer’s ability to bounce back from disaster.

“Our backups were taking 30 hours or longer, and our target was to complete them in a day,” said Jorge Zamur, IT Infrastructure Support Coordinator at Olímpica. “We didn’t have a formal disaster recovery plan, so restoring critical servers would have been a long and complex process.”

To avoid putting the brakes on company growth, Olímpica established brand-new backup and recovery operations using Veeam^®. To ensure best practice, the company chose a Veeam partner, Redsis, to support the implementation.

“We looked at software from many different vendors and it was clear that Veeam was the ideal solution to support our new contingency planning,” said Aguirre. “We’ve worked with Redsis for more than 20 years, so they know our infrastructure inside out. They helped us run some tests to see what Veeam can do, and it worked perfectly for our requirements.”

Working with Redsis, Olímpica built a disaster recovery environment and used Veeam to configure and manage a new set of backup and replication policies. The company now saves copies of back-office data to disk and tape daily.

“Veeam has transformed our data protection capabilities,” said Villamil. “We’ve gone from no real DR environment and backup windows of 30 hours to making copies of 100% of our back-office data twice a day. It’s a game-changer for Olímpica and puts us in a great position going forward.”

Olímpica can now keep its extensive retail network synchronized more effectively and can restore data much faster. As a result, the company’s managers gain access to the latest insights, driving better decision-making.

“By cutting our backup windows to less than 24 hours, we’ve prevented them from over-running and affecting the business,” said Villamil. “Our IT service level has improved dramatically, too. In fact, we’ve increased our SLA for our back-office applications from 94% to 99% with Veeam, which impressed our business users.”

By taking advantage of greater data availability enabled by Veeam, Olímpica is boosting operational efficiency. The company is giving its growing userbase of 8,000 people the tools to work to their full potential.

“Before Veeam, we didn’t always get our automatic orders generated overnight,” said Villamil. “That meant our supply chain teams would start the day with an incomplete order sheet, which led to time-consuming manual workarounds. Thanks to Veeam, we’ve solved that problem, so our production lines can run without delay.”

Olímpica is now better prepared for the unexpected, a valuable capability for a company that is thriving in a competitive sector.

“Cybersecurity is a growing priority for us, as we know no company is immune from attack,” said Aguirre. “With Veeam, we have immutable backups, giving us an amazing level of protection. Next, we plan to kick off our journey to cloud, which will give us the ability to move data between platforms. As Olímpica brings new locations and products to our customers, we’re delighted to have a trustworthy data protection solution like Veeam behind the scenes.”

• Saved 77% on backup times and accelerated disaster recovery, helping Olímpica extend its competitive edge.
  “To keep prices low and quality high for our customers we need maximum data availability,” said Villamil. “Veeam delivers that, so we can focus our efforts on serving even more customers.”
• Enabled the IT team to raise its performance SLA for critical applications from 94% to 99%, empowering employees to work more productively.
  Olímpica is giving its growing workforce rapid, reliable access to essential data and IT systems, allowing them to complete their tasks faster.
• Helped Olímpica initiate its journey to cloud by enabling easy, low-risk movement of data workloads between platforms.
  “Our strategy is to gradually move data to the cloud,” said Villamil. “Veeam is the ideal tool to help us achieve that goal, giving us granular control of our workloads and layers of redundancy in case anything goes wrong.”