Aalborg Portland Malaysia Opts for Veeam Availability Suite

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that cement manufacturer, Aalborg Portland Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. (Aalborg Portland) has deployed Veeam Availability Suite v8 to deliver the Always-On Business.

Aalborg Portland is part of Cementir Holding SpA, an Italian multinational company that produces and distributes cement, ready-mix concrete, aggregates and concrete products. As largest producer and exporter of white cement in the world with shipments to over 60 countries, Cementir Holding requires a reliable availability solution that simplifies recovery for its global subsidiaries and clients. In 2014 alone, it sold 9.6 million tons of cement, 3.5 million tons of ready-mix concrete and 3.3 million tons of aggregates. Minimizing downtime is a major factor for the construction industry as project developers, contractors and vendors await daily shipments to ensure construction progresses on time.

“In order for our company to maintain operations, our users need access to data all day, every day,” explained Raymond Lok, senior IT executive, Aalborg Portland Malaysia. “As such, Aalborg Portland cannot afford downtime as the impact of even a day’s delay could cost millions of dollars.“

Initially, Aalborg Portland used legacy backup tools for its everyday business operations.

“Creating vSphere VMs was fairly simple and straightforward, but backing them up was not simple and straightforward because our existing backup tool had certain requirements,” said Lok. “Each VM needed agents installed before it could be backed up, and that was time consuming. We also had to make sure backup storage size matched VM size before backup could begin. However, there was an even bigger limitation. Our backup tool was incapable of restoring data from backups made with earlier versions of the tool.“

Aalborg Portland’s business operations could not afford to halt operations for hours while a failed VM is restored. Therefore, Lok required an availability solution that kept pace with virtualization and simplified recovery. Aalborg Portland’s first experience with Veeam was a free trial with v4 of Veeam Availability Suite in 2009. Impressed with its capabilities, the company purchased a licensed version. Since then, every new version has been easy and straightforward to download and use.

With Veeam ensuring Recovery Time and Point Objectives of less than 15 minutes, Aalborg Portland is able to achieve fast, flexible and reliable recovery applications and data – reducing recovery time from hours to just minutes. Over time, Aalborg Portland has come to trust Veeam’s evolution and development and the company has come to rely on Veeam to maintain and ensure BC. Further, Aalborg Portland grows at a vast speed with data growing by approximately 10% every two years. With Veeam, they are able to scale to keep pace with data growth and today; the company backups 1.2TB of data.

Julian Quinn, VP, Asia and Japan, Veeam said: “We are proud to have Aalborg Portland as one of our longest and most loyal customers in Malaysia. With Veeam, Aalborg Portland can be assured that they have a solution that scales easily with data growth, improved availability and reduces the risk of downtime. As a direct result of Veeam’s backup and replication solutions, Aalborg Portland’s operations scales easily with data growth, improved availability and reduces the risk of data loss.“