Yerevan Brandy Company keeps legendary brandy flowing to customers with help from Veeam

The Business Challenge

Yerevan Brandy Company (YBC) has been taking advantage of the dry, sunny climate of Armenia to create high-quality brandy since 1887. Today, people around the world enjoy its famous ARARAT products. The company’s sustained success is down to a combination of preserving age-old traditions alongside a willingness to innovate.

David Ghazaryan, Head of IT at YBC, explains, “While we are proud of our brand heritage, we make sure that we utilize leading-edge technologies wherever possible to make our processes more efficient.”

To help maintain excellent quality while meeting growing demand, YBC recently adopted a virtualization concept for most of its IT infrastructure. The move highlighted areas for improvement with the company’s backup tools.

“Our previous Veritas backup solution wasn’t suitable for virtual machines,” comments Ghazaryan. “We also noticed that, as our data grew, backup and restore operations were taking an unacceptably long time to complete. We couldn’t run concurrent backup and replication tasks, limiting our ability to scale our IT environment.”

For YBC, high availability is a top priority to ensure that production and distribution run smoothly. The company could not afford any significant systems downtime or data loss and began looking for a more advanced data protection solution, to ensure it could continue bringing award-winning brandy to customers.

The Veeam solution

To enable simple, flexible and reliable data protection for both its virtual and physical workloads, YBC deployed Veeam Backup & Replication. A few months later, the company implemented Veeam ONE for monitoring and analytics of its IT environment.

“We considered various vendors and narrowed down our options to the Veeam offering for backups,” says Ghazaryan. “The implementation was straightforward, and we were impressed with the advanced functionality of the software. We had such a good experience with Backup & Replication that we decided to deploy Veeam ONE and were just as impressed with that solution.”

When Veeam Availability Suite, which brings together Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE, emerged, YBC opted for the new packaged offering. Ghazaryan comments, “Through Veeam Availability Suite, we get all the benefits of the separate products while optimizing license management.”

Using Veeam technology, YBC created a hierarchical backup scheme for its systems based on importance and change rate of the data. The company backs up a lot of data from dozens of virtual servers and physical servers each night.

“With Veeam, backups of both virtual and physical workloads is seamless,” explains Ghazaryan. “The deep integration with our storage hardware simplifies management, and we can usually get the results we want with just a few mouse clicks.”

YBC has gained new visibility and control of its IT environment, enabling the company’s IT team to take proactive measures to prevent issues. The team adapted fast to its new data protection capabilities, helping it to optimize use of resources.

“Deploying the Veeam solution made task delegation much easier,” says Ghazaryan. “It simplifies data protection significantly, relieving the pressure on the most skilled administrators. With Veeam, we’re confident that IT systems are highly available, so that the company can continue to bring great brandy to all the customers that enjoy ARARAT.”

The Results

• Simplifies management of backups, recovery and monitoring, and cuts time to complete backup and restore operations by 50 percent:
  Highly skilled administrators spend less time on everyday data protection tasks, backup and replication tasks can now run simultaneously and restore processes are faster. This boosts efficiency and protects the business from service interruptions.
• Supports innovation by helping YBC take advantage of the latest software releases:
  Ghazaryan explains, “Veeam updates its support capabilities promptly, so we can use the newest software versions without worrying about whether we will be able to back up those systems or not.”
• Reduces risk, offering IT team peace of mind that data is always secure:
  Helps the company focus on what it does best — produce fantastic brandy — assured that its data is always well-protected.