Australian Packaging Firm Visy Leverages Cloud for Backup and Recovery at Branch Offices

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced Australia-based packaging company, Visy Industries Australia Pty Ltd, is the first organization to deploy a Riverbed and Microsoft joint solution designed to eliminate the headaches of its branch office IT infrastructure, improve BC and minimize business disruption in the event of an incident.

Visy selected Riverbed’s hyper-converged edge solution SteelFusion to virtualize and consolidate its islands of remote and branch office infrastructure (including server, storage, and network components) in its data center. Microsoft and its hybrid cloud storage environment, based on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure StorSimple, was used to consolidate all branch office data for centralized storage, backup and recovery.

Visy, privately-owned, is one of the world’s most prominent packaging, paper and recycling companies. processing recyclables from more than 3.2 million households that are ultimately given a new life. In FY2013-14 alone, they produced more than 730,000 tons of fiber packaging, 494 million steel food cans, 1.5 billion beverage cans, 823 million beverage cartons, 2.2 billion plastic containers and 1.8 billion plastic preforms. The company has an international footprint, with more than 5,500 staff across 120 branch offices and facilities in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as trading offices across Asia, Europe and the USA.

Infrastructure Islands Left Branch Offices Stranded After Hardware Failures
For Visy, it is critical that branch offices – where business gets done and revenues are generated – are always up and running with the applications and services they need to stay productive. However, this had become an increasing struggle. Each remote and branch office operated its own infrastructure island, and across the offices there was a variety of backup technologies and application servers deployed on-site. This not only made the backup process complex and time-consuming, it also meant downtime if a server was corrupted or went down. What Visy needed was a single enterprise-wide solution for its branch offices and remote sites that would remove the complexity and cost of edge infrastructure while giving branch employees the performing applications they need to do their jobs.

Riverbed SteelFusion and Azure
To solve these challenges Visy turned to SteelFusion hyper-converged edge solution built for remote and branch office IT. Instead of deploying branch services on traditional servers on-site, those services were migrated to SteelFusion Edge with a planned rollout across 20 of Visy’s remote sites. In order to consolidate data and achieve greater agility, data from the edge is continuously streamed back to the SteelFusion Core located at Visy’s central data center in Melbourne. The SteelFusion Core then pushes this data to Azure cloud storage via the StorSimple appliance, eliminating the need for traditional data center storage. By deploying this solution, Visy has reduced its capital and operational expenses without compromising its business capability.

“Microsoft Corp. is excited to collaborate with Riverbed to bring another Azure offering to our joint customers. SteelFusion gives our customers a unique way to get their distributed data centralized and backed up in Azure. We see the power that this solution can bring for cloud-based storage,” said Nicole Herskowitz, senior director of product marketing, Microsoft Azure.

Simplifying Management and Ensuring Business at the Branch
“We had been looking for a few years to extend cloud-based backup to our edge sites, but it was never possible before we found SteelFusion which, together with Microsoft’s StorSimple, gives us the ability to backup those files and folders directly to Azure. We’ve removed a great deal of complexity from our environment, which will streamline IT management and administration. Ultimately, when you consider the competitive cost-per-gig we get from Azure and StorSimple, the productivity gains from accelerated recovery times, together with simplified management, SteelFusion was a no-brainer,” said Daymon Whitehead, IT operations manager, Visy.

SteelFusion and Riverbed Application Performance Platform
The Riverbed Application Performance Platform gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise. A key part of the platform, SteelFusion is a hyper-converged edge solution designed with the challenges of remote and branch office (ROBO) IT in mind. Unlike hyper-converged solutions purpose-built to simplify data center infrastructures, SteelFusion is built to enable the ‘hyper-converged edge.’ It simultaneously meets the top requirements of businesses, IT organizations and employees by reducing the operational cost of managing remote locations, increasing data security through centralization and encryption of data at rest and in flight, improving BC and IT agility with 100x faster recovery times and 30x faster deployment of branch services and sites, and providing up to a 100x increase in application performance at the branch for greater productivity.