Company Overview
If you’ve seen live music, you’re sure to recognize the Peavey® logo. As one of the largest manufacturers of musical instruments, amplifiers, and audio systems, Peavey® Electronics has helped musicians and audiophiles to achieve high-quality sound production since the 1960s. In the pursuit of perfection and reliability, the company wanted to improve the resiliency and security of its network infrastructure and critical data in its SAP HANA® implementation.
Evaluator Group conducted interview conversations with Peavey’s Chief Operating Officer (COO) and head of IT, which uncovered the pain points associated with a small IT team supporting fast-paced and large-scale operations for a global company.
Challenges
- Labor intensive backups
- Common errors in backup jobs
- Complete system backups impacted Peavy’s performance
- Current system did not allow for remote site restoration in the event of a disaster
Solution
Results
- Offloaded day-to-day management of data protection to a team of external experts
- Increased data availability and integrity as well as security for the critical SAP HANA system
- Implemented reporting tools for a snapshot into the status of backups
- A more modern infrastructure, including cloud-hosted storage
For Peavy, UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP & RECOVER translates into strengthened data protection at a more attractive cost structure due to lower operating costs and IT administrative overhead.
Challenges
Peavey needed to ensure additional availability so the system could withstand natural disasters and the boom in internal and external cyber security threats. At the same time, Peavey could not incur additional costs.
Prior to working with NEC, Peavey used a legacy approach for backup and data protection that was a manual, multistage effort. Their existing backups were incomplete because their Red Hat® operating system (OS) and SAP software image were not included. Peavy’s IT team had to manually execute backups, copy the backups each night which were picked up as a part of a batch and included other system’s data.
Peavy required a modernized approach for backing up their data that would achieve the following:
- Reduce the administrative load on Peavey’s small IT team
- Provide a complete backup of entire system data, including the operating system (OS), SAP HANA image, log files, passwords, and critical system boot data
- Ensure system backups could occur without impacting performance
- Enable remote/off-site restoration in the event of a natural disaster
- Provide a dashboard view into backup status and service level adherence
The Solution
Ultimately, Peavey turned to a managed service delivered by NEC in order to address its availability and cyber security concerns while also taking advantage of cloud computing and storage.
Peavey selected NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER managed service offering that offers a broad set of fully integrated services to manage and protect proprietary information and data. The solution itself is built on NEC’s award-winning server, storage, and software-defined networking technology for highly resilient and responsive computing and efficient hosting and housing sensitive data.
Results
NEC UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER managed service offering was able to cut Peavey’s time and expenses required to implement backups and disaster recovery for critical data.
Peavy no longer needed to pay its SAP Basis administrator to run backups, or systems administrators to manage and clean all of the backups. With NEC responsible for service management, their ongoing administrative work is further reduced, which is a significant factor considering how fast technology changes.
NEC implemented accuracy checking to ensure good backups, automation of creation and management of various backup copies to satisfy the 3-2-1 rule, as well as a self-service portal for Peavey IT staff to check on the backup environment without needing to call in – all of which further streamline processes while improving the data protection processes.
With NEC responsible for service management, Peavey’s ongoing administrative work has been reduced and allowed Peavy to offload the tasks and responsibilities related to meeting their data availability and integrity requirements.
NEC was described as standing behind its service and being invested in Peavey’s business success, stepping up to address any problems that arose in order to avoid service hiccups. For Peavey, this translates into strengthened data protection at a more attractive cost structure due to lower operating costs and IT administrative overhead.
