Veeam Implemented by Hospitality and Entertainment Peermont Group

Veeam Software, Inc., announced that Peermont Global (Pty) Ltd (Peermont Group), a hospitality and entertainment company, has implemented its Availability Suite, ONE, and Cloud Connect, to automate its backup environment and provide it with the scalability to address the data requirements of each of its twelve wholly-owned properties.

The Peermont Group operates across South Africa, Botswana and Malawi. It is renowned for running hospitality and gaming facilities with guests partaking in onsite fine-dining, relaxing hotel stays, exciting casino nights, live musical entertainment, soothing spa treatments, business conferencing, and sporting activities.

“Being a hospitality and entertainment company, we do not have the luxury of a downtime window or shutting operations over the weekend for system maintenance; we are always on the go with our business. For us, always-on customer service is fundamental. There is zero tolerance for not delivering a high-quality, around-the-clock service,” says Ernst Karner, group IT manager, Peermont.

He says he understands customer expectations and feels that it is unforgivable in this day and age for IT systems to go down, irrespective of the industry a business operates in.

He continues: “Customers expect to have access to services at any time of day or night. Things like internet access (which is provided free to all customers at all Peermont properties) have become a commodity. It is expected to be in place and to work hassle-free. If Peermont is unable to deliver this, people start becoming very unforgiving. Similarly if slot machines go down there is an obvious real-time impact on our revenue, and we can potentially lose considerable gross operating profit. But, beyond the financial impact, the reputational damage could also be significant. As such, we had to review our capacity across all spheres of the business – network, disk storage, and compute availability. For us, there is no such thing as a plan B. Uptime is critical and we identified Veeam as our partner of choice to address our hyper-availability requirements.“

Kate Mollett, regional manager, Africa South, Veeam, says that because Peermont operates in a regulated environment the focus was finding a way to not only meet its availability requirements but also ensure being compliant with requirements from the South African National and Provincial Gambling Boards.

“Veeam had to provide a strategic solution that could address all customer requirements and provide Peermont with the peace of mind needed to deliver continuous services to customers. They might operate casinos and hotels, but they needed to bet on a sure-thing, rather than take a roll of the dice. As an organisation, Peermont embraced hyper-availability from the day it opened its doors and required a partner to deliver on its own exacting expectations, to help it meet those of its high-class clientele,” she says.

Karner says that backing up and restoring data, the initial stage of Veeam’s five step plan to realise data management, has historically not been an easy proposition for the group: “We had multiple vendors claiming various features that sounded nice on paper, but the reality worked quite different. Unfortunately, no organisation can claim to not have any downtime or availability issues. The same can be said for us where drive failures were quite common in the past.“

From a compliance perspective, Peermont must deliver quarterly reports that show how data is backed up at casinos and illustrate its recoverability. It must also make daily offsite backups of the regulated part of the server. Previously, this required tape cartridges to be delivered by courier to an external facility. And when the time came to restore the data, it was a time-consuming process of recalling the tapes.

Using Veeam, Peermont has an agreement in place with an external cloud service for the secure storage of its regulated data. It can completely automate the recovery and offsite storage of this data.

Karner concludes: “Thanks to Veeam, we have been able to take a process that would take a whole day at each property, requiring numerous members of the IT team, fully automate it, and reduce the time to backup to just 15 minutes; it’s incredible. I sleep a lot better at night knowing I have a system that is reliable and can now recover lost data within minutes.“

The scalability Veeam provides the customer means it can cater for the requirements of each individual property, as Mollett describes: “Whether it is a smaller casino with a limited number of VMs or head offices with continuously expanding data sites that run into multiple terabytes, Veeam delivers on both ends of the spectrum. Veeam has dealt Peermont the strongest hand possible to realise its data management goals and ensure the integrity of its backups. In doing so, Veeam provides Peermont with the ability to restore critical data in the event of just about any disaster, rapidly. When it comes to data management, you don’t want to gamble with your reputation or your service delivery. “