Lindsay Australia delivers on time with Continuous Data Protection from Veeam

The business challenges

Lindsay Australia has been serving Australian’s farming community for more than 60 years. The company transports 1.6 million tons of freight annually including fresh produce and seafood across dozens of locations — many of which are in the most rural parts of the country. This level of logistics requires expert coordination as fresh items have limited shelf lives.

“Farmers depend on us to deliver their harvests quickly and efficiently, and the rest of the supply chain depends on us as well,” said Robert Hodgkiss, IT Infrastructure Manager at Lindsay Australia. “Over the years we’ve earned a leadership role in the industry, and we take that very seriously.”

Lindsay Australia has a modern fleet of more than 1,000 vehicles and containers, an expansive national footprint, a fully engaged workforce and an efficient IT infrastructure that supports the entire operation. When the company’s legacy backup solution was no longer reliable and began to threaten the integrity of data supporting the logistics of food delivery, the IT team replaced it.

“We needed a reliable and scalable backup solution that offered visibility into our backups,” Hodgkiss said. “We also wanted workload and license portability, enabling us to back up anything to anywhere, including a private cloud.”

Hodgkiss said he considered other options but selected Veeam’s backup solution because Veeam was the only one that met the company’s needs whilst adding additional capability.

The Veeam solution

Veeam provides Lindsay Australia with reliable and continuous data protection to support on-time deliveries. Veeam also validates and verifies backup recoverability to ensure business continuity, and it offers visibility and insight into the backup infrastructure through intelligent monitoring, reporting and capacity planning.

“Being in the logistics business means technology must be dynamic and agile,” Hodgkiss said. “It also means deliveries must be timely and accurate, so if that requires us to deploy a new IT system, we need to know data in that system will be backed up reliably. That’s why we chose Veeam. It’s dependable, scalable, easy to manage and provides continuous data protection.”

Veeam backs up and replicates 13.7 TB of data from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Nimble Storage snapshots across 68 virtual machines (VMs) on premises to a disaster recovery (DR) site and off premises to a private cloud. Hodgkiss said one of the features he appreciates most about Veeam is SureBackup because it tests, validates and verifies backups are recoverable. SureReplica does the same for replicas.

“Once we know data is recoverable, we also know we can recover it instantly, and that’s a key component of business continuity,” he explained.

Hodgkiss and his colleagues use a Veeam feature called Instant VM Recovery to restore a whole VM in minutes, including the SQL VM supporting Microsoft Dynamics, which the company uses for enterprise resource planning. Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and SQL Server enable fast object-level recovery.

Veeam also provides intelligent monitoring, reporting and capacity planning so the team can resolve issues before they spiral into problems that might impact the business.

“Veeam gives us insight into how the backup infrastructure is coping and how data is growing so we can forecast resource usage,” Hodgkiss said. “This is another way Veeam helps us maintain the integrity of our data.”

The results

• Provides reliable and continuous data protection to support on-time delivery
  “Farmers depend on us to deliver their harvests quickly and efficiently, and we depend on Veeam for continuous data protection, Hodgkiss said. “We know data is protected, recoverable and available to support on-time deliveries.”
• Validates and verifies backup recoverability to ensure business continuity
  “Veeam can restore critical data to our DR site in minutes,” Hodgkiss said. “We test our restore capability monthly to validate data integrity.”
• Offers visibility and insight through intelligent monitoring and reporting
  Lindsay Australia has gained tighter control of the IT infrastructure because Veeam identifies issues that can be resolved before they escalate and impact operations.