Australian Giant Picks Veeam to Help Drive Business Growth and Success
Veeam® Software, the leader in backup solutions enabling Cloud Data Management™, announced that Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers (WesCEF), part of Wesfarmers Limited, a Fortune Global 500 company and one of Australia’s largest publicly listed companies, replaced three backup solutions with one: Veeam Availability Suite™. Veeam provides a reliable backbone for each business unit’s business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) strategy, increases data recovery speed ten-fold and proves IT can become a business enabler, driving growth and sustaining success.
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WesCEF plays a pivotal role in Western Australia’s economy because its business units support several industries such as energy and agriculture. WesCEF’s energy business unit, Kleenheat, sells natural gas to thousands of homes and offices. The fertilizer business unit, CSBP, provides tons of fertilizer to farmers so they can grow bountiful crops. Agriculture is Australia’s fastest growing economic sector. According to a 2019 report from AgriFutures Australia, agriculture contributed more than $63 billion to the economy in 2017. The National Farmers’ Federation predicts agriculture’s contribution will grow to $100 billion by 2030.
“The best way we can support the economy is by making sure our business units are fully operational,” said Adem Cahtarevic, technology systems manager at WesCEF. “The most effective way to ensure this is to provide them with rock-solid BC and DR strategies that recover critical IT systems fast. Our challenge was slow recovery. Three backup solutions had been deployed, but they couldn’t recover fast enough, including Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.”
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If Kleenheat can’t recover Oracle E-Business Suite, details of customer accounts are not visible, and the business is unable to resolve queries or add new customers requesting gas supplies. If CSBP can’t recover Oracle JD Edwards, which is linked to a point-of-sale system, the business can’t track and charge for the correct amount of fertilizer provided to a farmer and help them monitor their history of fertilizer use. WesCEF tested several replacements for legacy backup, including CommVault and Veeam.
“It became clear very quickly that Veeam was the perfect solution for our business units and the antidote to unreliable legacy backup,” said Elliot Segler, senior cloud engineer at WesCEF. “Recovery is blistering fast and reliable, so we trust Veeam implicitly to protect our data. Since we deployed it in 2014, we’ve expanded our use significantly, and one thing is for sure: Veeam will protect anything we throw at it.”
Veeam provides a reliable backbone for each business unit’s BC and DR strategy, revealing remarkable scalability as data grew by hundreds of terabytes in two years and stellar sustainability as WesCEF modernized the IT infrastructure. Cisco HyperFlex was deployed first, followed by Microsoft Office 365 and Amazon S3.
“Using Veeam to back up from HyperFlex storage snapshots is a gamechanger for us,” Segler said. “We can’t believe recovery is 10 times faster — it’s like night and day. The integration between Veeam and HyperFlex is mind-blowing.”
Veeam backs up 450 TB across 550 virtual machines on-premises from HyperFlex storage snapshots for fast, local recovery and replicates off-premises for DR. Veeam Agent for Oracle Solaris ensures ERPs are protected, and self-service portal Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager gives each business unit the opportunity to recover critical applications on their own including ERPs.
Next WesCEF deployed Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. While Microsoft offers powerful services in Office 365, comprehensive backup isn’t one of them. To eliminate the risk of losing access and control of data in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, Veeam backs up on-premises and sends backup copies to Amazon S3 for cost-efficient, long-term retention.
“Each business unit wants access to all the data they’ve accrued over decades, so this is why Veeam Cloud Data Management is so important to us,” Segler said. “Veeam helps us protect their data and keep it available forever in S3.”
Nick Davies, senior systems administrator at WesCEF, said Veeam offers two big benefits related to S3.
“The first is being able to instantaneously copy the most recent restore point so we can extend the 3-2-1 Rule to object storage. The second benefit is immutability of backups, helping us protect backups from being modified or deleted by hackers and ransomware. Both capabilities broaden our BC and DR strategies.”
Cahtarevic said Veeam proved IT can be a business benefactor, driving growth and sustaining success.
“Veeam is incredibly scalable, no matter what we throw at it,” Cahtarevic said. “It’s simple to use and it always works, underpinning our business operations now and into the future. Veeam provides the best data protection on the market, offers the broadest integration with storage and lets us reliably retain data as long as we need in the cloud.”
