Ripu Bajwa and Saravanan Arunachalam
Legacy systems can prevent building a seamless business ecosystem and may need a technological transformation. In this case, SCHWING Stetter India Pvt Ltd took Dell Technologies and Uniware’s (Dell’s trusted channel partner) aid to upgrade their aging backup systems. Lionel Alva converses with Saravanan Arunachalam, Head – Information Technology, SCHWING Stetter India, Ripu Bajwa, Director Sales & General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India and KR Vergis, CEO, Uniware Systems to understand how SCHWING Stetter India Pvt Ltd turned the tables on its aging backup systems.
Could you tell us about SCHWING Stetter India Pvt Ltd’s facilities in India?
Saravanan Arunachalam (SA): SCHWING Stetter (India) Private Limited, a 100 percent subsidiary of the SCHWING Group of Companies, made substantial inroads into the Indian market and extended its export market internationally as a global manufacturing behemoth. SCHWING Stetter India presently employs over 4000 people — both on the payroll and on a contract basis — in one of India’s major manufacturing plants in Tamil Nadu.
What challenges was SCHWING Stetter India facing?
SA: SCHWING Stetter India began experiencing problems with their legacy backup system in 2019. We were seeing an increase in the backup window, VM level backup failures, a malfunctioning DR device, and an inability to perform deduplication owing to space constraints. SCHWING Stetter India had 45TB of data (20TB Structured + 25TB Unstructured), which presented a significant difficulty. Ergo, SCHWING Stetter India couldn’t restore data from the tape library due to improper sector formation and wanted to get rid of tape backups.
What were the stopgap measures that SCHWING Stetter India had to resort to?
SA: SCHWING Stetter India had to make do with fragmented backups, which put us in danger of not being able to fully restore consumers’ data. This might have caused the backup data’s integrity to be jeopardised, and data loss could have a substantial business impact. SCHWING Stetter India also wanted to keep its backup data up-to-date and be ready for an audit as part of its best practices compliance.
How does a single backup system help? How did Dell Technologies and Uniware resolve SCHWING Stetter India data backup challenges?
SA: A core backup is required, but not enough for our organization. A backup server, software, switch, and target device are all part of a typical legacy backup system. Therefore, SCHWING Stetter India wanted to upgrade to a single backup solution that would integrate all their applications, mail and file servers, and a few select devices across the IT environment that were running on VMware environments on multiple physical servers.
Dell Technologies’ professional analysis and solution sizing skills, as well as Uniware’s prior knowledge in the deployment of Dell Data Protection systems, with a consultative approach, enabled SCHWING Stetter India to establish the optimum business outcome for its current and future demands. The execution of the long-term backup solution by Dell Technologies and Uniware went off without a hitch.
How did Dell Technologies and Uniware approach the backup solution?
Ripu Bajwa: The three main goals of the new backup system for SCHWING Stetter India were:
- To limit the backup window as much as possible
- Configure VM, file, and exchange backups to the new backup system and moving away from tape backups
- The Dell EMC IDPA 4400 can also be used to control any application or database (Windows, Linux, etc.).
To quantify and assess the present backup scenario at SCHWING Stetter India, the Uniware team performed a live optical evaluation on the existing backup system. To get a better idea, the Uniware team looked through data from the previous 90 days to check on daily and weekly backups. The software solution was created based on this assessment.
The deployment commenced in the data centre (DC) in Sriperumbudur, Chennai, with this analysis in hand. A combination of Dell EMC Avamar Data Protection Software and Dell EMC Data Domain DD6300 was used at the data-recovery (DR) location in Cheyyar, Tamil Nadu.
The implementation of the long-term backup solution has proven to be a success. SCHWING Stetter India is now able to do timely backups, with all compliances in place. This has further positioned Dell Technologies and Uniware to stay ahead of the competition when it comes to consulting with SCHWING Stetter India for any future backup requirements that may arise — reinforcing the superiority of the backup infrastructure that Dell has been able to provide.
KR Vergis: Before we implemented the backup solution for SCHWING Stetter India, we along with Dell Technologies did an extensive test of their 90-day data to understand their backup issues. We were able to examine results on a daily and weekly metric; thus we accurately pinpointed where their previous backup infrastructure was lagging and t allowed us to recommend the best possible solution — the Dell EMC IDPA 4400.
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