Always on

By Rebecca Gibson on 13 September 2015

This article was first published in the Summer 2015 issue of OnWindows

CBRE Asia Pacific has more than 9,000 employees in 87 offices across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Macau, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam who align clients’ business objectives with their real estate requirements. CBRE Asia Pacific is part of CBRE Group, which is the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm.

As an always on business, CBRE Asia Pacific was finding its back up process time and labour intensive. Physical servers were backed up to tape and recovery could take hours or days. Recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) weren’t set because the focus was on growth.

“Backup with the legacy tool was uncertain, so we worried about failed backups,” said Darren Warner, the organisation’s regional director for infrastructure and operations. “Our IT team isn’t large, and we don’t have time to troubleshoot failed backups.”

CBRE Asia Pacific turned to Veeam for optimised backup and replication across its WAN, high-speed recovery and consolidated monitoring of its physical and virtual resources. It also migrated 500 VMs to a new infrastructure. “Two different storage systems were involved during the migration with no direct network connectivity between them,” Warner said. “Storage migration across the network would have been cumbersome because we would have had to establish network connectivity. Storage migration would have been lengthy too – 20TB of storage would have taken an entire weekend to migrate.

“With Veeam Backup & Replication, replicating that same workload took less than one hour because WAN acceleration is built into Veeam, which we absolutely love,” Warner continued. “Veeam has better WAN acceleration than our WAN acceleration appliance. That’s why we set up hardware bypasses to let Veeam handle WAN acceleration.”

The results have been remarkable. Warner said the Veeam Management Pack (MP) lets CBRE Asia Pacific view its physical and virtual environments through a single pane of glass, which allows the IT team to see and resolve issues before they impact the business. “Veeam Backup & Replication fits alongside Veeam MP to keep us always on,” he explained. “We have a level of comfort that if a virtual machine fails, we have a backup and a replica we can easily restore or fail over to for business continuity. If we don’t stay always on, our reputation will suffer.”

The solution also reduces the risk of data loss and verifies backup recoverability. “The most important thing about Veeam is that it just works,” Warner said. “We’re confident our data is there and we can bring it back. We don’t worry about Veeam.”