Junghans Group simplifies data management and accelerates protection for SAP with Actifio

Junghans Group has successfully deployed Actifio to dramatically simplify data management while enhancing data backup and disaster recovery for its mission-critical SAP environment.

Junghans, the largest specialty retailer in Germany, is continuing to expand throughout Europe, but its existing backup tools were not keeping up with the demands of the growing business. Junghans chose the Actifio platform to manage and protect its SAP application data because of Actifio’s operational simplicity, fast recovery and its SLA-driven protection to minimise the risk of data loss.

As the Junghans IT team supported the Group’s expansion, their main concern was securing against data loss and disasters. The company’s existing backup systems – based on LTO tape libraries and legacy backup software – had proven too costly, inflexible and unable to meet the SLAs of the business. With two busy mail-order houses to support, it was imperative for the lean IT team to find a solution to safeguard their critical SAP data, but also consolidate infrastructure wherever they could – to reduce complexity and administrative costs.

Junghans has found that Actifio has brought several notable benefits and efficiencies to the Group, including:

· Reduction of SAP backup times from days to 15 minutes, and restoration of SAP services in 5 minutes;
· Elimination of multiple data management tools including tape libraries and traditional backup systems; and
· Reliable SLAs to meet the recovery time and recovery Point objectives (RTO and RPO) of the business and the ability to secure data as required by data protection legislation.

Mario Staas, Head of IT Services at Junghans Group, said: "Our team is relieved because working with Actifio is very easy. Actifio is reliable, and our employees benefit from its ability to recovery data rapidly and minimise any loss in a disaster. Our company benefits from Actifio’s ability to meet demanding SLAs, and in turn, that positively impacts our customers.”

By virtualising the management and retention of data, Actifio allows businesses to eliminate multiple data silos and point tools for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, analytics, and test and development, and instead rely on one, SLA-driven, data virtualization solution. Actifio’s platform provides Junghans with the ability to protect and manage a single ‘gold’ copy of each applications’ data which will be updated incrementally forever, from which virtual copies can be accessed for any use case. This has lowered hardware and software costs, reduced dependence on expensive infrastructure and let Junghans Group’s operations staff stay lean.

"We looked at a number of data management solutions from different vendors and nothing met our requirements like Actifio," said Bastian Strümpel, IT Specialist and Project Manager at Junghans Group. Blue Consult, the Kempen-based IT consulting and service provider was instrumental in the Group’s successful adoption of Actifio. "We were particularly pleased with the high level of expertise and dedication of everyone involved,” added Strumpel. “Only a few days after start of the implementation phase were we had deployed the system.”

With around 50TB of data to protect, Junghans Group needed a data management system with rapid data processing abilities, to keep up with production workloads. The IT group can now manage its SLAs for critical applications with ease, thanks to Actifio.

"We back up our SAP systems every 15 minutes,” said Strumpel. “The backup of current inventory and transaction data is extremely important for a mail-order company. In the event of a data centre failure or an individual system collapse, our Actifio system allows us to boot mission-critical IT services quickly at a different location. With Actifio, the re-establishment of our multi-terabyte SAP system takes just five minutes.”

Daily monitoring is not an onerous task for Junghans Group thanks to clear status reports from Actifio. The addition of new application servers to Actifio’s management and recovery of individual data sets or even complete systems now takes only a few clicks of a mouse.