Veeam assists in data governance for the “ZPMC 4.0” era

The Business Challenge

As a leader of the Chinese equipment manufacturing industry, and motivated by “Made in China 2025” blueprint, ZPMC developed the “ZPMC 4.0” implementation phase, with the mission to upgrade and restructure from traditional industry, which includes five essentials: Transformation from “made in China” to “created in China,” transformation from general product selling to specialized product selling, transformation from a manufacturer of equipment to a provider of integrated solutions, transformation from a seller of hardware to a seller of software and services and transformation from a traditional manufacturing model to a digitalized manufacturing model.

Driven by the transformation, ZPMC needs to cope with the primary challenge of information silos caused by the traditional business system — how to integrate these data systems, and recreate the core business system and the traditional ERP and CRM systems to better serve the needs of the business revolution.

Zhao Zijian, deputy general manager of the Standardization and Information Management Department of Zhenhua Heavy Industries, believes that the basic and master data are very important in the equipment manufacturing industry. “These data span the entire lifecycle of our design, manufacturing, after-sales and maintenance processes,” Zhao Zijian said. “ZPMC has learned from the past experiences of many other companies and decided to put data governance as the front end of our core system construction.” This is not an easy task for ZPMC, which has more than 300 VMs and a huge amount of data. It will solve the issue of backing up all data from the virtual data center.

The process of data governance should guarantee data security and reliability, as well as data integrity and business continuity during the migration process from traditional databases to virtual data centers. According to Zhao Zijian’s introduction, ZPMC needs to take three approaches in practical operation: Add an encryption system, migrate to a virtual data center and select a fast and effective backup and restoration solution. These three measures must be carried out at the same time, and business continuity must be ensured.

The Veeam Solution

ZPMC had experienced loss of project files before, and tried to use technology to recover them. However, the recovery process was time and labor consuming, and consequently, they hoped to learn from the past and find a reliable and convenient option while selecting the backup recovery software.

“Our entire IT infrastructure includes the data center, network and professional business systems.” Zhao Zijian said. “The data center is the core component and uses Veeam’s solution.”

Veeam Backup & Replication has become the preferred choice of ZPMC. In this solution, the functions such as Instant VM Recovery, application recovery, file recovery, automatic recovery verification, no need for deployment or maintenance agent, single backup, integrated complete backup, replication, Hyper-V support, and cost have produced an immediate effect when the solution was implemented.

ZPMC has over 300 VMs and stringent requirements in terms of VM backup and recovery. Veeam’s solution can recover virtual applications and data quickly, flexibly and reliably and integrate the VM backup and copy functions into a single system. At the same time, Veeam’s vPower technology provides outstanding VM recovery performance so that once a fault occurs, the system can restart within a few minutes. This is like adding a temporary backup machine to the VM, delivering 24.7.365 business Availability and guaranteed business operations.

It is worth mentioning that Veeam’s support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments which can recover ALL applications and data with < 15 minutes of RTPO. This solution is a good fit for ZPMC since they are already using the VMware vSphere virtual environment.

The user experience of Veeam’s solution is also outstanding. Zhao Zijian said, “Veeam products don’t require client installation on every device, which greatly improves operation efficiency, and they also provide quick and seamless support for existing NetApp storage. The underlying storage is closely associated so that efficient and accurate recovery can be implemented, which creates a great experience for users of virtual applications.” At the same time, Zhao also expressed his expectations for Veeam products. “We hope that Veeam can quickly release the physical machine support in the new version so that we can incorporate physical machines that are not part of the virtual machine network into the system,” he said.

Currently, ZPMC is trying out Veeam ONETM and Zhao Zijian has praised the high performance of Veeam ONE’s virtualization monitoring. “We hope that besides the monitoring of our own data center, the monitoring solution can be applied to networks, server rooms and other applications,” he said. In the future, ZPMC will continue establishing new data centers. Zhao Zijian also expressed his great confidence in Veeam’s continued support and expansion capabilities.

The Results

• RTPO of < 15 minutes for full recovery of ALL applications and data
  Fast, flexible and reliable virtual application and data recovery that integrates VM backup and copy functionalities into a single software solution. Supports VMware vSphere virtual environments so that RTPO for full application and data recovery time is within 15 minutes.
• Backup speed is 20 times faster than competing products
  Based on NetApp storage architecture, Veeam can implement efficient and flexible backup and recovery operations. Veeam’s all new functions can be further improved by utilizing existing NetApp technology to implement quick backup. Thanks to the perfect combination of the two, storage image snapshots allow backup to be 20 times faster than competing products and fast restoration is also available.
• A temporary backup device is added for VM backup and restoration, delivering 24.7.365 business Availability
  Veeam’s solution can recover virtual applications and data quickly, flexibly and reliably and integrate the VM backup and copy functions into a single system. At the same time, Veeam’s vPower technology provides outstanding VM recovery performance so that once a fault occurs, the system can restart within a few short minutes. This is like adding a temporary backup machine to the virtual machine, delivering 24.7.365 business Availability.