Since its founding in 1974, the UNIORG Group has been a reliable expert partner for company-wide IT solutions, with a very special commitment to SAP. Its long-term mission is to help companies improve their performance and optimize business processes for small and medium-sized enterprises as well as global corporations. Different customer environments and a growing trend towards managed services inspired the company to evaluate a new backup solution. Through its long-term certification with SEP sesam for SAP and its new managed service licensing model, they choose the reliable backup and recovery solution from SEP. Since SEP sesam covers the complete data protection portfolio, only one solution is required for the entire data backup.
As an international full-service provider in the SAP environment, UNIORG develops individual SAP-based solutions because every company is different and needs tailor-made concepts. Its 170 employees in Berlin, Chemnitz and Walldorf, Germany, and in Pittsburgh, USA, are in close contact with customers in order to gain precise insights into the company’s needs. The enthusiasm and creativity of the UNIORG team create the custom solutions that improve work processes for customers every day – and that is the company’s goal. It has been achieved for more than 40 years thanks to flexible structures and a flat hierarchy.
Backup and recovery have been central pillars of UNIORG’s entire IT management since the beginning. But growing demands on SAP platforms have brought previous data protection solutions to their limits, whether with SAP Business One, SAP NetWeaver platform or virtualized infrastructures with database servers like SAP HANA, MaxDB, SQL and corresponding client access options with VMware Horizon VDIs.
The availability of customer applications that always handle business-critical processes in the SAP environment, are responsible for functioning order and delivery processes, for instance, need to be consistently and quickly backed up and restored in the event of a disaster without data loss and with the agreed RTOs and RPOs. The certifications for various SAP environments were also decisive factors in the new solution.
“Certified backup solutions for all products in use were vital criteria for us,” says Dirk Kotthoff, Business Unit Manager for IT at UNIORG. “Until now, we had been using various solutions. However, they haven’t delivered the performance we need for our cloud applications and our customers, to whom we offer full service.”
UNIORG carried out the selection process on the basis of flexibility with regard to mapping backup strategies and the cost/benefit factor of (SAP-)certified backup solutions.
“Only SEP sesam includes all these factors,” Dirk Kotthoff summarizes. “SEP optimally fulfills the important criteria, such as fast recovery during system failure and outsourced data backup.”
Besides its own IT infrastructure, data backup is also used for the customer hosting infrastructure. Nearly all hosting infrastructure is comprised of new releases. However, older test and demo systems must also be provided for their own environment if they are used by maintenance customers. This is one of the prerequisites for certification by SAP, which UNIORG’s Partner Center of Expertise (PCOE) has again received. In addition to classic systems, customers’ highly-sensitive in-memory databases are also protected. System failures always have direct effects on customers’ productive operation. Backup as a managed service is becoming an increasingly important part of UNIORG’s services. Customers appreciate a worry-free model that offers full service. Customer applications
SEP provides managed service provider licensing models by servers/components and by volume. With clear counting and billing procedures, UNIORG can guarantee continuous transparency. The full service provider retains control over the licenses used and can calculate planned expenses. For these license models, billing is made on a monthly basis according to actual usage. The MSP license allows UNIORG to roll out up to 25 SEP sesam backup servers per basic license to physically separate customer environments. Backups can be performed on any supported media. UNIORG first performs a backup-to-disk and then preserves these backups, by performing a offline copy on seperate tapes (backup-to-tape). All features for the site-to-site replication of backup data are already included in the SEP sesam basic license. This provides the foundation for all mappable concepts with SEP sesam, like backup to a remote data center or into the cloud, and provides maximum flexibility for an easy introduction to Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS).
UNIORG opted for SEP sesam because of its variously supported environments, its certifications for SAP HANA and its flexible MSP license model. Dell PowerEdge Server is used as platform. The Veeam solution that had previously been in use, as well as script-based solutions, were completely replaced. Only two months passed between the commissioning of the license training and the operational start in April 2016. “SEP sesam convinced us from the outset,” says IT Manager Kotthoff.
“The simple adoption of our backup concept and the consolidation of the various solutions to date have exceeded our expectations. We can now easily assure our Service Level Agreements (SLA) for retention and recovery times.”
In the future, all extensions and new customer applications will be integrated directly into the backup concept and centrally controlled and monitored by the central management interface. “We can now give our customers an even better argument to work with us, especially because of the SAP certifications of SEP sesam. After a short adaptation phase, a Service Level 1 administrator is also able to monitor and control processes in SEP sesam,” says a pleased Dirk Kotthoff.