Veeam helps Regina Miracle bolster business confidence with 50% faster backups and improved RTO to minimize data loss while meeting compliance needs

Recent years have seen Regina Miracle revamp its IT infrastructure in anticipation for business expansion and growing data use from its operations in Hong Kong and the core manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen and Vietnam. The company migrated from a legacy virtual server environment to Nutanix AHV running all its key systems from ERP to HR and production systems. The move to Nutanix AHV also prompted a review of the data backup operation and the need for a solution that could provide seamless, speedy and reliable backup for the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure. “We needed the best possible availability for all our key applications and workloads running on Nutanix AHV so we could modernize our IT end-to-end and maintain business continuity at all times,” said Eric Chung, IT Director, MIS Department, Regina Miracle.

Regina Miracle has been using Veeam on its core ERP system, so it was a natural progression to adopt Veeam’s AHV solution as the experience with the previous backup provider for AHV environment was found to be unsatisfactory — being slow, resource-intense with no cloud backup capability. At the same time the company’s rapid growth in use of Microsoft 365 created a further need to back up all  users that were now increasingly reliant on the platform considering the shift to remote and hybrid work.

Increased communications between corporate staff with vendors and customers elevated the critical nature of the data flow between all parties. Growing use of email often saw multiple user requests for restoration of emails or missing files which added to the IT workload and lengthy downtime for the affected staff. To ensure minimal data loss and maintain critical business operations, coupled with the satisfactory backup solution from Veeam on its ERP system, Regina Miracle extended the use of Veeam solutions to all its Microsoft 365 users.

Regina Miracle deployed Veeam Backup & Replication for Nutanix AHV to provide backup agility and simplicity through a centralized, manageable and deployable Nutanix AHV Proxy combined with the Veeam Backup & Replication platform services plugin. This immediately reduced the time required for backups from four to less than three hours, at the same time increasing its restore capability and improving its recovery time objective (RTO). Data portability has improved with Veeam’s unified backup file format, providing direct restore to the cloud and other hypervisors, plus enhanced file-level recovery and the ability to recover Nutanix AHV workloads instantly. Past efforts to do a full data restore used to take up to 2.5 hours but Veeam dramatically reduced the restore time.

Backup success rates have also improved, with past failures often due to insufficient storage. Veeam automatically enabled 20-30% data compression resulting in successful backups with fewer storage capacity issues. As a result, this led to cost savings on additional storage hardware.  Veeam currently backs up around 250TB across 300 virtual machines (VMs) on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Backup success rates have also improved, with past failures often due to insufficient storage. Veeam automatically enabled 20-30% data compression resulting in successful backups with fewer storage capacity issues. As a result, this led to cost savings on additional storage hardware.  Veeam currently backs up around 250TB across 300 virtual machines (VMs) on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

One area of immediate positive business impact was the area of data integrity and protection where in the past the audit department would challenge the IT team on the security of data and the risk of data loss. By adopting Veeam for reliable backup and replication of Exchange Online, the group’s users can now access a self-service feature to quickly recover data such as email that is accidentally deleted or lost. This helps improve RTO at the user level as the self-service feature allows for faster recovery of lost or missing data where in the past they would depend on IT support to recover data which may not be immediate.

Regina Miracle is currently evaluating to expand the use of Veeam beyond Exchange Online and include other apps within Office365 including Teams, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. Stanley Kwan, IT Manager, MIS Department, Regina Miracle also noted there is a future need to leverage historical data to apply data analytics which would require further capabilities for real-time data access.

Overall, the adoption of Veeam has provided a much greater level of confidence and reassurance around the company’s data protection needs. “We used to worry a lot about the backup and restoration process. But now with Veeam we don’t have to be anxious about the backup performance or the storage space, and Veeam saves us a lot of time,” said Kwan.

50% faster backups, improved backup success rate, while reducing  on-premises hardware cost
With Veeam, speed in backup improved from four to less than three hours. With 20-30% data compression, backups are completed more often with fewer storage capacity issues leading to cost saving on additional storage hardware which was a constant occurrence with the past setup.

Improve RTO by 30% while minimizing data loss
Under its legacy setup, Regina Miracle used to spend 2.5 hours for data restoration, now the restore process is smooth and typically takes less than 2 hours. Also, in the event of accidental deletion of email and related data, Veeam has also enabled self-service email restoration for users so they can recover lost data quickly with minimal downtime or drain on IT resource.

Reliable off-site backup storage and enabled group to meet audit requirement to retain data for seven years
Due to Veeam’s workload and license portability, Regina Miracle can now back up any workload across any environment (on-premises, cloud or hybrid). With reliable on-site and off-site backup, the IT team is able to respond with confidence that company’s data is fully protected and recoverable allowing it to meet compliance and audit needs that require data retention for up to seven years.