Food & Beverage Company Improves BCDR with Air-Gapped Nodes
Challenges:
The food and beverage company wanted to make sure that their critical systems remained
operational even in the event of a ransomware attack. When their IT
staff realized that their legacy backup wouldn’t be able to do that, they reached out to StoneFly.
Solution:
StoneFly DR365 Veeam-Immutable Veeam Air-Gapped (VIVA) air-gapped nodes with automated network and power
management.
Results:
- Automated air-gapped
backups for physical servers and VMware virtual machines. - Set up BCDR strategy that
follows 3-2-1-1-0 rule.
Faster backups and reduced storage space consumption. - Shorter Recovery Time
Objectives (RTOs).
Organization
The company is a food and beverage producer in the United States and have been in the market for decades. Their diverse portfolio includes potato chips of various flavors, and soft drinks. With customers from all across the US, they have a distribution network of more than 20 self-operated delivery points and some stores.
Industry
Food & Beverage
Challenges
The company processes 30,000 orders daily. To keep up with the nationwide snack cravings, their manufacturing plants operate 24 hours a day, 6 days a week.
After a careful audit of their existing data protection systems, the company’s IT staff realized that it was inadequate and would not be able to facilitate quick recovery or effectively prevent data loss in the event of a ransomware attack. A disruption in operations could create a supply chain gap which would in turn lead to unhappy distributors and unsatisfied customers.
“We needed to be sure that our operations could withstand a ransomware attack and continue without disruption” said Dan, the IT head of the company, “Our legacy backups were unreliable and our team was uncertain if we would be able to recover quickly in the event of a disaster.”
Solution
The company chose StoneFly DR365 Veeam-Immutable Veeam Air-Gapped (VIVA) nodes to replace their legacy backup system and custom-build a data protection solution as per their budget.
The DR365VIVA are Veeam-ready air-gapped nodes that in addition to supporting all Veeam backup, replication, and restore capabilities also enable the IT team to automate isolation and network and power management. When isolated, the data stored in the air-gapped nodes is inaccessible and cannot be maliciously encrypted, hacked, or deleted.
Furthermore, the company can also leverage built-in immutable storage and Write-Once Read-Many (WORM) features such as file lockdown, and S3 object lockdown. While recovery features such as instant VM recovery, granular file-level recovery, full VM recovery, ensure faster recovery and shorter Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)
“We moved from an unreliable legacy backup to an automated ransomware-proof solution that provides air-gapped backups and immutability – all within our budget”, said Dan, “We now have a backup and DR (BCDR) strategy that ensures availability and guarantees recoverability”
The Results
Secure Physical Servers and Virtual Environments
With the DR365VIVA, the company can backup all their critical Windows and Linux physical servers, and VMware virtual machines (VMs), and store backups on-premises and in the cloud.
Additionally, the IT staff has automated isolation, immutability, and backup data and snapshots storage in the air-gapped nodes.
Not only is the company able to protect all their critical IT infrastructure but is also able to automate most routine jobs making data protection seamless and less-prone to human error.
Set up 3-2-1-1-0 Backup Strategy
In order to ensure ransomware protection and high availability, the company’s IT team has set up the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy: keeping multiple copies of their data on two different storage media with at least one copy offsite, one copy air-gapped, and zero-errors.
The DR365VIVA provides the on-premises air-gapped and immutable storage volumes, the cloud gateway to integrate secure repositories in Azure, and the data management features such as automated storage tiering – making it an integral component of their BCDR strategy.
Faster Backups and Efficient Storage Space Consumption
Equipped with high speed NVMe SSDs, and enterprise SAS/SATA drives, the DR365VIVA delivers faster backup and recovery. As opposed to legacy backups, routine backup jobs are finished quicker, less compute is used, and bottlenecks are avoided.
Furthermore, built-in storage optimization features such as deduplication, FlashCache SSD caching, and automated storage tiering reduce storage space consumption in turn increasing Return on Investments (ROIs) and cost-effectiveness.
Reduced Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)
After orchestrating their disaster recovery plan and simulating recovery jobs, using the virtual lab included in the air-gapped nodes, the company’s IT team is confident in their ability to restore critical functions within minutes – if a disaster strikes.
The NVMe SSDs help quickly spin up VMs and backups of critical servers on the DR365VIVA while the cloud gateway and management server facilitate data restore to Azure if necessary.
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