Mansfield Oil Company Uses Veeam

Veeam Software, In. announced that Mansfield Oil Company, a North American energy supplier based in Gainesville, GA, is using Veeam to enable data center availability.

Working with Veeam Gold ProPartner ProSys Information Systems Inc., Mansfield Oil has been able to reduce the amount of time spent on managing and troubleshooting backups by 75% and is able to offer a SLA to internal users around application and data availability.

Founded in 1957, Mansfield Oil delivers 3.5 billion gallons of fuel each year to healthcare organizations, corporations, fleets, retailers, convenience stores, and government agencies through a network of refiners, suppliers and carriers throughout the US and Canada. These customers rely on Mansfield Oil to remain operational, because, without fuel, transportation comes to a standstill, and in worst-case scenarios, lives could be at stake. If Mansfield Oil is unable to both recover business operations quickly and deliver fuel 24x7x365, millions of people could be adversely affected.

“We were spending 80% of our time running and maintaining backups and only 20% of our time focusing on data center projects that would move the business forward,” said Hercu Rabsatt, director of infrastructure and service management, Mansfield Oil. “We needed a single, easy-to-use data availability strategy that integrated tightly with our nearly 100% virtualized environment.“

With its legacy systems, backup jobs were unreliable, making frequent backup impossible, and recovery of critical systems could take up to a day. Mansfield Oil’s IT team could never offer SLAs to internal customers because it was impossible to meet recovery time and recovery point objectives.

Veeam and HP StoreOnce aligned with Mansfield Oil’s strategy to leverage virtualization in its modern data center, centralize backup management and reduce administration time. Together with NetApp Fabric-Attached Storage, which was already part of their data center, the trio helped Mansfield Oil accomplish two major business goals: reduce data center expenses and offer SLAs to internal customers for the first time.

Each solution has built-in deduplication; therefore, the backup footprint in NetApp FAS decreased by 30%, and the backup footprint in StoreOnce decreased by 20%. Plus, the combined purchase price of Veeam and HP StoreOnce was 72% less expensive than other backup and storage solutions.

Mansfield Oil’s second goal was to offer SLAs to internal customers, which is possible because the company can meet RTPOs with Veeam’s high-speed, granular recovery. Veeam Explorers provide visibility and item-level restore in backups for Mansfield Oil’s most critical systems: Active Directory, Exchange, SQL and SharePoint. Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots also helps Mansfield recover individual items, guest files and VMs from NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror and SnapVault.

Rabsatt said he had terrible nightmares about VM backup before Veeam, but now they’re gone. Mansfield Oil’s data center has delivered benefits in spades because it is rooted in technology that supports availability.

“For the first time in the history of our company we have enterprise data protection,” he explained. “When the CEO says: ‘You can feel the difference,’ that’s a big deal. The IT team has earned a new level of respect within the company.“

“For the enterprise, the question is no longer, ‘Are we backed up?’ Today’s enterprise IT leaders are asking, ‘Are we always available?’” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO, Veeam. “Veeam enables IT to answer that latter question in the affirmative, with RTPOs of 15 minutes and the assurance that, if a key application goes down, IT will be able to recover quickly.“

Veeam Availability Suite v8 combines data protection and virtualization management expertise of Veeam Backup & Replication with the monitoring, reporting and capacity planning functionality of Veeam ONE for vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.