Veeam helps to keep production lines running at Hero MotoCorp, the world’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer

The Business Challenge

As the world’s largest manufacturer of two-wheeled vehicles, Hero MotoCorp’s extensive global operations consists of eight manufacturing plants producing more than nine million units per year and a distribution network across 40 countries. The company has sold nearly 100 million units to date, and successful operations at this massive scale rely heavily on its IT systems.

Critical to its operations, data availability and integrity are not only fundamental to business success, but also ensure that the brand doesn’t lose its hard-earned reputation. For instance, Hero MotoCorp manufactures a new product every two seconds, which means even a minute’s downtime will affect the production of 30 vehicles.

At the scale they operate, an hour of IT infrastructure downtime can lead to substantial financial losses and irreversible reputational damage.

“Data is at the heart of Hero MotoCorp’s business, hence data protection is our biggest priority. Any disruption to data availability will bring our business-critical functions to a halt and throw the entire supply chain off track,” explained Sujoy Brahmachari, Senior General Manager and CISO, Hero MotoCorp.

Effective backup and recovery capabilities are crucial for Brahmachari’s team to meet their SLAs to the business. However, the company’s existing data management system was not reliable enough.

“In the event of an unplanned incident, we should be able to recover the data quickly with minimal downtime, yet our existing solution was unable to meet this key requirement,” he shared.

The existing tool was also lacking in terms of ease of use, further adding to inefficiencies in managing data.

“We needed a reliable data management tool that would give us the confidence of restoring our data fast if an incident occurs, making it available to the business as soon as possible to avoid disrupting our operations,” Brahmachari said.

The Veeam Solution

Faced with the task of replacing the company’s dated backup infrastructure with a reliable backup and recovery system, Brahmachari evaluated various data management solutions in the market, including Commvault and Veeam.

With speed of recovery being the top business priority, Brahmachari zeroed in on Veeam Availability Suite for its ability to offer faster recovery timelines than all competitors in the market.

With the majority of Hero MotoCorp’s infrastructure being virtualized [on VMware], Veeam’s powerful recovery solution for VMware was also another advantage.

After careful consideration, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on the Veeam solution turned out to be significantly less than the other vendors. The solution’s ease of use also played a key role in Brahmachari’s decision.

“A key reason we chose Veeam Availability Suite was its ease of management. It is completely agentless for the virtual environment, making it extremely easy to use,” he said. “Furthermore, it is not dependent on any particular platform or has any specific configuration requirements, which is a plus point.”

Hero MotoCorp has since backed up the entire infrastructure of its Windows platform and some parts of its Linux platform using Veeam Availability Suite. This covers more than 30% of the company’s entire infrastructure catering to business-critical applications like production.

The Results

• Faster data backup and recovery
  With Veeam, the company reduced data recovery timelines by 75%, assuring the business of minimal disruption in the event of an unplanned incident. In turn, this brings down the time taken to rebuild the entire system post-incident from 24 hours to 12 hours. In addition, time taken for regular daily backups has been reduced by around 40% using Veeam Availability Suite.
• Improved data integrity
  Veeam improved Hero MotoCorp’s data integrity with its robust security features and 100% data recoverability. “Veeam is a rugged system and the failure rate is very low, making it highly credible and reliable. We are confident that our systems will be available 24/7 even if we encounter unexpected downtime,” said Brahmachari.
• Ease of management reduces TCO
  Veeam’s ease of use has simplified the entire data management process for Hero MotoCorp. “The single-view dashboard helps with performance analysis while giving us better visibility into our entire virtual and backup infrastructure for faster response,” explained Brahmachari. Overall, the move to Veeam has helped Hero MotoCorp bring down the TCO by almost 40%.