Staples Solutions helps customers adapt to their changing workplaces with assistance from Veeam

The Business Challenge

Staples Solutions offers much more than paper clips and pens. The company helps customers create the right workspaces to accomplish their goals. Staples is the go-to solutions provider for the workplace of today and tomorrow.

“Customers are our top priority,” said Aleh Sadaunichy, Infrastructure Solutions Architect at Staples Solutions. “Our company provides a broad assortment of products and services online and in retail stores to ensure customers have what they need to be successful. To meet their needs, our IT infrastructure must be available, and the best way to ensure availability is through reliable backup and recovery.”

Staples Solutions had reliable backup and recovery across 25 branch locations, but each branch had deployed its own solution. Several products were in use including Acronis, Commvault, Symantec and Veeam. Sadaunichy said a team of engineers spent significant time managing backups and updating licenses each month.

“Our challenge was centralizing and simplifying data protection,” he said. “We needed a scalable, affordable solution that was hardware neutral so it could work in every branch. We also needed a solution that offered both backup and replication so we could protect the IT systems directly impacting customer satisfaction like our ERP and our two e-commerce engines. If the databases supporting these applications can’t be recovered, we might not meet customer satisfaction.

“We also wanted the ability to back up on-premises and to Azure Blob,” Sadaunichy continued. “Moreover, we didn’t want to lose access and control of data when we transitioned to Office 365. Microsoft tells you it doesn’t offer comprehensive backup, and since accidental deletion is common among users, we have to be able to recover quickly and easily.”

The Veeam solution

Staples Solutions replaced the legacy backup solutions with Veeam Availability Suite and later deployed Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. Veeam centralizes and simplifies data protection to support customer satisfaction and extends fast, easy on-premises backup and recovery to Office 365 data. Veeam also saves significant backup management time and licensing costs each year.

“You can’t beat Veeam for simple, reliable and affordable data protection,” Sadaunichy said. “Veeam protects our IT infrastructure so we can meet customers’ needs.”

Veeam backs up and replicates 600 TB across 1,500 virtual machines from HPE Nimble Storage Snapshots on-premises and to Azure Blob Storage. Veeam Cloud Tier, an automatic tiering feature of Scale-out Backup Repository, offloads older backups to affordable cloud-based object storage such as Azure Blob, enabling Staple Solutions to achieve the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule (3 different backup copies on 2 different media with 1 copy offsite, 1 copy air-gapped, immutable or offline and 0 backup recovery errors, thanks to a Veeam feature called SureBackup, which verifies recoverability). Veeam also backs up 50 TB of Office 365 data (including 2,700 mailboxes) on-premises for fast, easy recovery.

“Veeam is the best solution for us,” Sadaunichy said. “It works in every branch because it’s hardware neutral, and Veeam licenses are portable so we can back up any workload across any environment. When we transitioned to Office 365, protecting it with Veeam was the next logical step because Microsoft’s native Office 365 capabilities don’t offer traditional, on-premises backup. Extending Veeam protection to Office 365 was a no-brainer.”

One of the capabilities the IT team likes best about Veeam is high-speed recovery. Instant VM Recovery restores an entire VM in minutes, and Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams enable the team to recover granularly when users accidentally delete items.

“Having this capability is critically important,” Sadaunichy said. “Office 365 data grew considerably during the pandemic when employees worked remotely, especially Teams’ data, so knowing recovery is just moments away is comforting.”

Sadaunichy said he and his colleagues are looking forward to additional Veeam functionality such as Continuous Data Protection (CDP), a hardened Linux repository of immutable backups for extra ransomware protection, expanded instant recovery for Oracle and SQL, and Azure archive, which could provide an additional cost savings.

“We’re already saving money each year because Veeam is more affordable than legacy backup, especially with regard to licensing, so an additional savings with Azure archive is worth exploring,” he said.

Sadaunichy said Veeam also saves time in backup management.

“Veeam is very user friendly, so the learning curve is quite small. If you value simple, straightforward data protection, you should look at Veeam.”

The Results

• Centralizes and simplifies data protection to support customer satisfaction
  Staples Solutions is a multinational retailer of office supplies, making life easier for millions of people. Veeam helps ensure the IT systems supporting customer satisfaction, which includes the ERP and e-commerce systems, are always available.
• Extends fast, easy on-premises backup and recovery to Office 365 data
  Microsoft provides a wide array of powerful services within Office 365, but a comprehensive backup of Office 365 data is not one of them. Veeam eliminates the risk of losing access and control of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams. Staples Solutions knows data is always protected.
• Saves significant backup management time and licensing costs each year
  “Veeam is much easier to use than legacy backup and it’s more affordable, saving significant time and money,” Sadaunichy said.