Westfleisch, a leading meat marketer in Germany and Europe, is implementing Actifio solutions to modernise its IT operations.
Westfleisch, headquartered in M?nster, Westphalia with about 5,000 employees, operates nine production sites, and works with 4,000 agricultural cooperation partners. The company relies on powerful IT, and has been using SAP, VMware and Windows systems for an IT infrastructure built primarily with IBM components. Westfleisch works continuously to modernise its overall IT, including the connections to its field offices. The renewal of its storage infrastructure had become necessary due to a strong need for additional storage capacity, performance and flexibility, and to get the growth of data copies under control.
Based on these needs, BLUE Consult GmbH defined a solution for the Westfleisch SAP environment, using the Actifio Copy Data Virtualisation platform. This was complemented by a further Actifio appliance for systems without SAP on the same site, to ensure disaster recovery on these machines too. Furthermore, Actifio Sky virtual appliances will allow each of the seven remote sites to replicate their data to the physical appliances back at HQ.
The Actifio platform ensures that the requirements for data control, recoverability, RTO (Recovery Time Objective), RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and disaster recovery are met. Actifio covers all the necessary functions for data backup through a single integrated solution. This includes backup, snapshot, restore, disaster recovery (DR), business continuity, replication, de-duplication, compression, encryption and WAN optimisation functions. This allows the management of data to be decoupled from the underlying physical infrastructure.
Actifio’s solution eliminates siloed systems, meaning less storage infrastructure, less software, fewer licenses, drastically reduced data backup and recovery times, and reduced operational complexity. The heart of the Actifio solution is the Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology, a distributed object file system in which the fundamentals of data management - copy, save, move and restore - are centrally virtualised.
"The introduction of the Actifio platform for data virtualisation has advanced our SAP environment greatly. In terms of speed, management and reduction of complexity, this technology brings us a big step forward," said Jens Alex, Head of IT at Westfleisch. "The savings in terms of time and personnel utilisation also enable us to use our resources more efficiently."
Actifio’s solution also allows testing based on the latest, real-time data, enabling Westfleisch to implement DevOps processes, and providing a development environment that is ready for the company’s future growth. The solution enables intelligent system diagnostics for rapid troubleshooting, giving Westfleisch a highly available data backup and recovery service it can rely on.
“Enterprises in Europe, and throughout the world, are increasingly recognising that data virtualisation allows for more efficient management and more intelligent use of their data,” said Chris Hammans, Managing Director for EMEA at Actifio. “Westfleisch is a great example of a company that is looking ahead to the ever increasing amounts of data being created, and using Actifio’s copy data virtualisation platform to enable its IT to use this data as a competitive advantage, rather than a burden.”
