Penske Australia and New Zealand Chooses Veeam Backup & Replication

Penske Australia & New Zealand, a supplier of heavy-duty trucks, diesel and gas engines, power systems and related parts, has replaced Veritas NetBackup with Veeam Backup & Replication.

Veeam increases backup, replication and recovery speeds by 90% and ensures failover, making DR efficient and reliable. It also supports regulatory compliance and helps protect vs. cyber-attacks.

Penske Australia & New Zealand is wholly-owned by Penske Automotive Group, Inc., a Fortune 500 company that operates automotive and commercial vehicle dealerships across the US and Western Europe. It provides trucks that transport goods and services across both countries, which means the availability of IT systems is critical to the continuity of logistics. The company also provides engines for buses, trains, maritime vessels and military vehicles and supplies generators that deliver electricity to mines, hospitals and large city infrastructures.

Several IT systems support Penske Australia & New Zealand. Two of the most critical are Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Pentana ERP.

“If they’re not available, we’d be in a world of hurt,” said Bobby Stojceski, technology and security manager, Penske. “We wouldn’t be able to provide the level of service our customers expect and deserve. We also wouldn’t be compliant with regulatory requirements, and we’d be exposed to the ever-increasing threat of cyber-attacks. Data protection is a top priority, that’s why we didn’t waste any time replacing NetBackup. Backup and recovery solution were slow, unreliable and difficult to manage. Replication wasn’t easy either. We used VMware SRM to replicate, but at the time, it could only replicate at the storage level, and we needed to replicate at the VM level for faster DR. Veeam provides a simple, integrated solution that saves the company valuable time.“

Stojceski said being able to fail over to the DR center is the biggest benefit Veeam provides: “It means monitoring and maintenance services we provide to customers won’t be interrupted, enabling us to do our part to keep the lights on in hospitals and cities for public health and safety, confirm engines in military defense vehicles are operating at maximum capacity, and keep trucks on the road so they can deliver freight to support the economy.“

Penske also uses SureBackup to verify the recoverability of backups, helping the IT team tick off compliance tasks for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM) and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). As a business holding sensitive government data, ensuring a high level of multi-region compliance is essential for the protection of not only the company, but also the economy from cyber-attacks.

“Knowing Veeam helps protect our data is reassuring,” Stojceski said. “Don’t get me wrong-we’re on high alert, but if our network were breached, Veeam replicas and backup repository would help us recover our IT systems fast.“

Veeam backups and replicates 36TB across 200 VMs from Cisco HyperFlex storage snapshots. Penske implemented the HyperFlex system a few years after deploying Veeam.

“Backup, replication and recovery have never been so fast because Veeam integrates so well with HyperFlex,” Stojceski said.

In addition to integration, he said Veeam and HyperFlex have something else in common: they offer a roadmap for the future. Unfortunately, the future included Covid-19.

“We could have been in tough shape if we hadn’t installed Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex before the pandemic. Veeam allowed us to deploy and protect a remote desktop environment in a matter of days, enabling 300 employees to work from home. There’s never been a more important time to make sure goods and services keep moving through Australia and New Zealand. We’re grateful Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex help us maintain business as usual.“

Case study: Veeam helps Penske keep Australia and New Zealand moving