Vietnamese Steelmaker Hoa Phat Group Chooses Veeam and CMC Saigon Technology and Solution Company

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Hoa Phat Group (HPG), the largest steel manufacturer in Southeast Asia, has chosen ots Availability Suite over Avamar, Commvault and Veritas to drive digital transformation, support steel production and support their goal of becoming one of the largest steelmakers in the world.

Veeam was the only data protection solution HPG considered that met every business requirement SAP-certified backup, CDP and ransomware prevention. It reduces recovery time by 300% while saving 800 administrative hours every month along with $45,000 in IT operating costs annually.

“Veeam modernized data protection and became an integral part of our digital transformation and steel production,” said Phan Ngoc Lam, head of the IT department, HPG. “We’re building competitiveness by optimizing IT.“

HPG worked with long-time business partner CMC Saigon Technology and Solution Company Limited (CMC TSSG), a technology solution and service provider, to create and implement a digital transformation that synchronizes the IT environment with all stages of steelmaking. One of the challenges was finding a SAP-certified backup solution to protect SAP S/4HANA, an enterprise resource planning system that HPG planned to deploy.

“We were using several proprietary backup solutions at the time, but they weren’t SAP-certified, and if SAP S/4HANA isn’t backed up properly, steel production could be interrupted,” said Phouc Pham, Viet, deputy of the IT department, Hoa Phat Dung Quat Steel joint stock company, which oversees HPG’s largest steel manufacturing plant – Hoa Phat Dung Quat iron and steel complex.

“That wasn’t the only challenge,” he continued. “The backup solutions were complex and decentralized, and they didn’t provide features for CDP, ransomware protection and high-speed data recovery. They also didn’t provide monitoring and alerting, so our administrators spent hundreds of hours each month managing backup.“

Veeam backups 64TB of data across 140 VMs and 24 physical machines in 2 locations and replicates between them for DR. If disaster strikes, Veeam CDP ensures VM replicas are in a ready-to-start state. If ransomware strikes, the firm protects backups from malicious intent or data deletion via a hardened Linux repository. It also detects the initial stages of a ransomware attack by monitoring for suspicious activity.

“If we need to recover data for any reason, recovery takes minutes, not hours like the previous backup solutions,” Lam said. “Instant VM Recovery and Veeam Explorers for Oracle and SQL Server reduce recovery time by 300%.“

Phouc said choosing Veeam has given the IT department peace of mind: “If something goes wrong we know can restore data fast so the business can continue to operate. We also know we can extend Veeam data protection to the cloud if that is in our future.“

Veeam helps enterprises like HPG accelerate cloud adoption, actualize cloud savings and achieve DR and compliance goals through long-term retention and disaster readiness.