California Dairies Deploys Veeam Rather Than Commvault

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that California Dairies, Inc. (CDI), a milk processing powerhouse with more than $4 billion in annual sales across all 50 states and in more than 50 countries, credits Veeam with helping maintain milk production and payments to dairy farmers.

Veeam protects critical data used to collect, market and process milk and ensures BC through verified DR strategies. It also fast-tracks data protection for multi-cloud ecosystems and offers additional ransomware resilience.

CDI is the largest farmer-owned milk processing cooperative in California, producing approximately 40% of the state’s milk and 20% of the nation’s butter. Comprised of more than 300 dairy farms that provide nearly 17 billion pounds of milk annually, it processes this milk to make butter, fluid milk products and milk powders.

Producing fresh, high-quality dairy products every day is fundamental for CDI, but it can also be a challenge if there’s an unforeseen IT incident.

The end user found a way to recover data during unforeseen incidences more than a decade ago when the company transitioned to virtualization. After determining that Symantec Backup, which backed up physical servers to tape, wasn’t suitable for VMs, it considered switching to Commvault but chose Veeam Availability Suite instead.

“Veeam was the leading backup solution for virtualization, just like it is today,” said Matthew Prieto, director of infrastructure and security, CDI. “We’re very glad we chose Veeam because it has saved us from one IT headache after another. When stuff hits the fan, we know we can count on Veeam.“

The first time it hit the fan was when Exchange email (on-premises) suddenly became unavailable.

“It was on a Friday at 4 p.m. and I was getting ready to leave on vacation, but our Exchange servers failed,” Prieto said. “I began troubleshooting the cause to no avail, so I contacted Microsoft, but they couldn’t determine the root cause quickly enough, and we needed to be up ASAP. I reached out to other experienced friends in the field, but they couldn’t determine the cause either. My vacation was already postponed because it had been 36 hours, so with no resolution in sight and Monday morning fast approaching, I decided, to put my faith in Veeam. I restored the entire Exchange environment from a backup – it was fast, incredibly easy and worked as expected. The entire Exchange environment was fully restored, all data was accounted for and users were unaware of how catastrophic it could have been. Later when the opportunity arose to migrate our on-premises environment to the cloud, we didn’t think twice about deploying Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 because we knew how simple and reliable recovery could be. We also knew backup was our responsibility, not Microsoft’s.“

He said the second time it hit the fan was scarier. Custom-built software supporting milk payments to dairy farmers had failed in the middle of the night: “I can’t stress enough how important our farm families are to our organization,” he explained. “For 5 hours I tried to troubleshoot the software issue, but by early morning it was still unresolved. That’s when I began referring to Veeam as our emergency parachute. I yanked on the ripcord and said: ‘Let’s go Veeam. You’ve never failed us before, so don’t fail us now.’ And it didn’t. The entire system restore was quick and all systems were fully functional by sunrise.“

Veeam backups 72TB of data across 240 VMs to ExaGrid, which replicates to a DR site. CDI’s DR strategies include Veeam DataLabs to verify recovery of backups and replicas and Instant VM recovery to restore in minutes. In addition, it creates immutable backups in Amazon S3 storage for additional ransomware protection. It also backups and protects 14TB of data in Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Exchange) to an on-premises ExaGrid repository, which replicates to a DR site for additional protection. And, Veeam sends backup data to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3, allowing for protection, security and resiliency of data in long-term, low-cost object storage.

“Veeam is our guarantee that data will be protected and available when we need it,” said Prieto. “Veeam has our back – it’s absolutely core to BC. Veeam delivers a level of comfort I can’t describe.“

Case study: California Dairies deploys Veeam to protect Microsoft 365 data and mitigate cyberattacks.