Specialty Foods Company Cooks-Up Ransomware-Proof Data Center with StoneFly and Veeam

Organization

A manufacturer of gourmet foods, established in 1977, based in Newark, California. The company offers appetizers, entrees, desserts, and other frozen products.

Industry

Consumer Staple Products | Frozen Foods

Challenge

In order to continue delivering disruption-free service to their growing customers, the company is committed to leveraging digital transformation and enhancing business operations.

However, with their existing legacy infrastructure, the company’s IT team realized that accommodating data growth while ensuring business continuity would become a challenge in the near future. Especially considering cyber-threats like ransomware target which could potentially disrupt operations and lead to loss of business and reputation.

The company processes thousands of orders, invoices, and shipments on a daily basis. An hour of downtime could spell a financial disaster for them.

“The biggest potential risks are disruption and data loss – be it due to a ransomware attack, virus, or an accidentally deleted file” said Micheal, the Chief Technology Officer for the company, “If data is inaccessible at any point in time, we’re looking at disruption which can lead to unsatisfied customers and franchises in addition to financial loss.”

“We wanted our IT infrastructure to be easy-to-manage, reliable, and future-proof. So, we knew we were looking for a unified solution that combined virtualization, data protection, and cloud; could scale easily and in the event of a disaster allowed us to recover operations quickly” said Micheal.

Solution

StoneFly Veeam-ready backup and disaster recovery (DR) appliance (DR365V) checked all the requirements for the company. With StoneFly DR365V, the company is able to enhance their business operations, build a reliable data center, and address future needs within their budget.

“We’re able to test our backup plans in the virtual lab without affecting the production environment, SureBackup™ automatically makes sure that our backups have completed successfully, and we can directly spin up critical VMs on the appliance which allows us to reduce recovery times and downtime.” said Micheal. “And the built-in air-gapped and immutability features make sure that our business and customer data is safe from ransomware”

In addition to simplifying the IT infrastructure, reducing recovery times and protecting data from ransomware attacks, the DR365V supports popular virtualization environments and storage protocols; making the move quicker and easier.

“The migration process was faster than expected and simpler to implement” noted Jeremy, the IT manager for the company.

With the DR365V, the company can seamlessly run all applications, software, databases, store data on-premises or in the cloud, and leverage Veeam’s reliable backup and DR software to protect their data. The unified setup reduces cost, simplifies management, and helps ensure business continuity seamlessly.

Previously, the company’s IT staff had to manage multiple dedicated servers and do 80% of the administrative tasks manually which included creating and storing copies offsite, ensuring backup data integrity, and keeping track of how recent the backups and snapshots were.  When the company started offloading these tasks to DR365V, they were able to automate them in turn reducing management overhead.

The Results

Secure Ransomware-Proof Backup Strategy with Air-Gapping and Immutability

With the built-in air-gapping and immutable storage, the company can store their transactional data, customer data, and other sensitive information in secure ransomware-proof repositories. In addition to supporting on-premises air-gap volumes, the DR365V also allows them to setup and use Cloud Air-Gapped™ volumes that can be used to archive confidential information.

Automate Backups, Snapshots, and Replication

Instead of dedicating IT staff to manually set up backups, snapshots, and replication jobs, they can automate the process. The automation helps the company’s IT administrators to ensure 24/7 availability of critical data, which in turn, simplified data management.

Unified Data Center

The DR365V enables the gourmet company to replace multiple dedicated hardware with a unified data center in a box capable of supporting storage, virtualization, and backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) – as a result, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The built-in support for NAS, SAN, and object storage protocols allowed the company to decommission older and end-of-life (EOL) physical servers and replace them with high performance virtual servers on DR365V – without any additional cost(s) or hardware.

With the source and the target on the same high-performance appliance, the company observed an improvement in overall IT operations which in turn improved business productivity.

Future-Proof and Scalable Infrastructure

Each DR365V 4U rackmount provides up to 1.5 PBs of raw storage capacity per node – and it can scale up and scale out. The company chose to start with what they needed and scale when their workloads and data grows – saving upfront costs.

“When our data grows, we know that our infrastructure can handle it without forklift upgrades and with no disruption. That’s a big plus for us” said Micheal.

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