European Provider of Workplace Products and Services, Staples Solutions Chooses Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Staples Solutions B.V., a provider of workplace products and services for 9 million customers throughout Europe, has replaced several legacy backup solutions with Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

Veeam centralizes and simplifies data protection to support customer satisfaction and extends fast, easy on-premises backup and recovery to Office 365 data. It also saves backup management time and licensing costs each year.

“You can’t beat Veeam for simple, reliable and affordable data protection,” said Aleh Sadaunichy, infrastructure solutions architect, Staples Solutions. “Veeam protects our IT infrastructure so we can meet customers’ needs.“

Today’s workplace is nothing like the workplace of 10 years ago, and tomorrow’s workplace will be different after Covid-19. This is a matter of course for Staples Solutions, which has helped customers adapt to changes in the workplace since 1991. To meet their needs, the company’s IT infrastructure must be available, but maintaining availability was time-consuming and costly after several backup solution (Acronis, Commvault, Symantec and Veeam) had been deployed across 25 branch offices.

“Our challenge was centralizing and simplifying data protection,” Sadaunichy said. “We needed a scalable, affordable solution that was hardware neutral so it could work in every branch. We also needed a solution that offered both backup and replication so we could protect the IT systems directly impacting customer satisfaction like our ERP and our two e-commerce engines (Intershop and Genesis). If one of the databases supporting these engines can’t be recovered, we might not meet customer satisfaction. We also wanted the ability to backup on-premises and to Azure Blob. Moreover, we didn’t want to lose access and control of data when we transitioned to Office 365. Microsoft tells you it doesn’t offer comprehensive backup, and accidental deletion is common among our users, so we have to be able to recover quickly and easily.“

Veeam backups and replicates 600TB across 1,500 VMs from HPE Nimble Storage Snapshots on-premises and to Azure Blob Storage. Veeam Cloud Tier, an automatic tiering feature of scale-out backup repository, offloads older backups to affordable cloud-based object storage such as Azure Blob, enabling Staple Solutions to achieve the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule (3 different backup copies on 2 different media with 1 copy offsite, 1 copy offline and 0 backup recovery errors, thanks to a Veeam feature called SureBackup, which verifies recoverability).

Veeam also backups 50TB of Office 365 data (including 2,700 mailboxes) on-premises for fast recovery.

“Veeam is the best solution for us,” Sadaunichy said. “It works in every branch because it’s hardware neutral, and Veeam licenses are portable so we can backup any workload across any environment. When we transitioned to Office 365, protecting it with Veeam was the next logical step because Microsoft’s native Office 365 capabilities don’t offer traditional, on-premises backup. Extending Veeam protection to Office 365 was a no-brainer.“

One of the capabilities the IT team likes best about Veeam is high-speed recovery. Instant VM recovery restores an entire VM in minutes, and Veeam Explorers for Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams enable the team to recover granularly when users accidentally delete items.

“Having this capability is critically important,” Sadaunichy said. “Office 365 data grew considerably during the pandemic when employees worked remotely, especially Teams’ data, so knowing recovery is just moments away is comforting.“

He said he and his colleagues are looking forward to additional Veeam functionality such as CDP, a hardened Linux repository for extra ransomware protection, expanded instant recovery for Oracle and SQL, and Azure archive, which could provide an additional cost savings.

“We’re already saving money each year because Veeam is more affordable than legacy backup, especially with regard to licensing, so an additional savings with Azure archive is worth exploring,” he said.

He said Veeam also saves backup management time: “Veeam is very user friendly, so the learning curve is quite small. If you value simple, straightforward data protection, you should look at Veeam.“

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