Veeam Availability Suite is providing Lindsay Australia with reliable and continuous data protection to support on-time delivery, as well as visibility through intelligent monitoring and reporting.
Lindsay Australia is a fully integrated transport, logistics and supply company that serves customers in the food processing, food services, rural and horticultural sectors. Founded in 1953, Lindsay Australia employs approximately 1,000 people across an extensive delivery network of nearly 40 locations from coast to coast.
Lindsay Australia transports some of the most valuable freight in the world – food that feeds families. The company works in partnership with Australian farmers and all parties in the supply chain to put food on people’s tables.
The business challenges
Lindsay Australia has been serving Australia’s farming community for more than 60 years. The company transports 1.6 million tons of freight annually including fresh produce and seafood across dozens of locations – many of which are in the most rural parts of the country. This level of logistics requires expert co-ordination as fresh items have limited shelf lives.
“Farmers depend on us to deliver their harvests quickly and efficiently, and the rest of the supply chain depends on us as well,” said Robert Hodgkiss, IT Infrastructure Manager at Lindsay Australia. “Over the years we’ve earned a leadership role in the industry, and we take that very seriously.”
Lindsay Australia has a modern fleet of more than 1,000 vehicles and containers, an expansive national footprint, a fully engaged workforce and an efficient IT infrastructure that supports the entire operation. When the company’s legacy backup solution was no longer reliable and began to threaten the integrity of data supporting the logistics of food delivery, the IT team replaced it.
“We needed a reliable and scalable backup solution that offered visibility into our backups,” Hodgkiss said. “We also wanted workload and license portability, enabling us to back up anything to anywhere, including a private cloud.”
Hodgkiss said he considered other options but selected Veeam’s backup solution because Veeam was the only one that met the company’s needs while adding additional capability.
“Veeam Availability Suite was the only contender,” he continued. “I had prior knowledge of Veeam, and I knew its capabilities.”
The Veeam solution
Veeam provides Lindsay Australia with reliable and continuous data protection to support on-time deliveries. Veeam also validates and verifies backup recoverability to ensure Business Continuity, and it offers visibility and insight into the backup infrastructure through intelligent monitoring, reporting and capacity planning.
“Being in the logistics business means technology must be dynamic and agile,” Hodgkiss said. “It also means deliveries must be timely and accurate, so if that requires us to deploy a new IT system, we need to know data in that system will be backed up reliably. That’s why we chose Veeam. It’s dependable, scalable, easy to manage and provides continuous data protection.”
Veeam backs up and replicates 13.7 TB of data from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Nimble Storage snapshots across 68 virtual machines (VMs) on premises to a Disaster Recovery (DR) site and off premises to a private cloud. Hodgkiss said one of the features he appreciates most about Veeam is SureBackup because it tests, validates and verifies backups are recoverable. SureReplica does the same for replicas.
“Once we know data is recoverable, we also know we can recover it instantly, and that’s a key component of Business Continuity,” he explained.
Hodgkiss and his colleagues use a Veeam feature called Instant VM Recovery to restore a whole VM in minutes, including the SQL VM supporting Microsoft Dynamics, which the company uses for enterprise resource planning. Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and SQL Server enable fast object-level recovery.
Veeam also provides intelligent monitoring, reporting and capacity planning so the team can resolve issues before they spiral into problems that might impact the business.
“Veeam gives us insight into how the backup infrastructure is coping and how data is growing so we can forecast resource usage,” Hodgkiss said. “This is another way Veeam helps us maintain the integrity of our data.”
Intelligent CIO asked Robert Hodgkiss, IT Infrastructure Manager at Lindsay Australia, further questions about the project to find out more.
What necessitated your decision to implement the solution?
To ensure we had a reliable backup solution.
How has the system improved your company’s performance?
It has improved our IT response times and backup recovery times.
What are the main benefits of the monitoring and reporting capabilities provided by Veeam?
Allows a single pain of glass to ensure all backups tasks are successful and provides an overall health viewpoint of our Veeam topology.
How scalable is the solution?
Veeam is very scalable and is always adding additional features to allow a greater coverage of current and emerging technologies.
