Veeam protects systems and strengthens agribusiness 4.0 at Ferrari Agroindústria

The Business Challenge

The agribusiness sector represents more than 21% of Brazil’s economy. Products such as sugar and ethanol are some of the highlights produced in the country that move the industry. As in any other current field, agribusiness has evolved, reaching new levels through technology.

At Ferrari Agroindústria, manufacturer of sugarcane, sugar and alcohol in Pirassununga, in the state of São Paulo, the investment in technology has become a difference maker, especially in the last five years. “All factories need technology to plant better, to harvest better and to deliver a better product. There are technologies for logistics, plantation, harvesting, and to extract as much as possible of the sugar cane to produce all byproducts, besides the technology to produce energy from the sugarcane bagasse”, said Sandro Bizi, IT supervisor at Ferrari Agroindústria.

The use of technologies to optimize production and efficiency with less resources comes from the need to maintain competitive in an industry which depends on many climatic factors and is also influenced by the internal economy of the country. Therefore, Usina Ferrari, as it is commonly known, found itself placed in a 4.0 agribusiness scenario, with the need to deal with the complexities of the digital economy, such as the management of all its data, which grew 30% in two years.

The Veeam’s Solution

Organized in development, support and infrastructure, Ferrari Agroindústria’s IT department chose Veeam Availability Suite to obtain intelligent data management. “We keep an eye on the company’s business and data availability. With this always in mind, backup was a very critical subject, because we had restore requests that demanded a lot of time, our previous solution was too slow and could not meet our needs anymore”, said Sandro Bizi. “With our infrastructure totally based on virtual servers, we needed a technology on the same level. I heard other people describing Veeam’s solution and I was very enthusiastic about it. After the implementation, I saw that it is really fantastic.”

Veeam’s solution protects more than 40 virtual servers and all critical assets from Ferrari Agroindústria, including the Human Resources systems, industrial and agriculture systems, ERP, and many others. Among them, there are important tools specialized in the input information on sugarcane and production, and on the control of the supervisory machinery. “ They are critical systems that take care of all the life in the plant. The most critical, also under Veeam’s protection, is the database, which contains all company’s information, historical data of more than 20 years that cannot be lost. If an equipment breaks down, it is possible to buy another, but the information needs to be well preserved”, said Bizi.

BS4IT, Platinum ProPartner of Veeam with offices in the cities of Ribeirão Preto and São Paulo, was responsible for selling and implementing Veeam Backup & Replication and offers a value-added service to Usina Ferrari, with a dedicated person to verify and control Veeam’s solution. “Being Veeam’s partner, I am sure the solution I’m selling to the customer is going to work. It was a great challenge to develop a project in an environment with countless variables and high complexity, were availability was a critical factor. The result was gratifying and brought a lot of tranquility to the customer”, said Fernando Della Torre, IT analyst at BS4IT.

While information was previously not always available, and it took hours to restore them in case of incidents with the previous solution, today, speed of recovery is one of the main benefits of Veeam’s solution mentioned by Ferrari Agroindústria. According to Sandro Bizi, if there were a problem in the server, it took eight hours to restore the data with the previous solution so that people could return to their activities. Today, with Veeam, a server is restored in only ten minutes. “It is a tremendous difference, there is no comparison, Veeam’s solution is really wonderful”, he said.

The Results

• Unprecedented speed in restore
  In case of any incident, the restore time of a server decreased from eight hours to only ten minutes.
• Complete protection of all the environment
  Confidence that all the company’s data are safe, including administrative systems, agriculture and industrial systems and database.
• Simplified data management
  With a constant growth of its data, Usina Ferrari simplified its information management with Veeam to strengthen its presence in the 4.0 agribusiness