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Driving confidence with mature data protection

Loss of customer or financial data could be catastrophic.

Johannesburg, 27 Aug 2019

Bakwena builds, operates and maintains approximately 400 kilometres of toll roads across three provinces in South Africa. Managing these toll facilities entails various activities, which include (among others) collecting payment information from the drivers who use the roads, e-tag transponder data, and other geographic information system (GIS) data. The company processes, on an average, 210 000 toll-road users each day. On the back-end, all this data is stored in an Oracle database within a physical server environment.

Attempt to refresh data protection goes badly wrong.

Bakwena was backing up the Oracle databases to tape. To improve efficiency, it decided to extend a third-party solution it was already using to cater to a new production system roll-out.

The third-party vendor specialised in protecting virtual environments but claimed, after detailed technical analysis, that its proposed solution could back up Bakwena’s physical Oracle servers to a virtual environment. Only once Bakwena had purchased the software solution and hardware to run it on did it discover the solution could not back up physical machines due to software functionality and design issues.

The vendor tried for eight months to find a workaround in the QA environment before Bakwena gave up – despite its significant investment – and sought a solution that would properly protect its environment.

“Regrettably, someone in the design phase for the third-party vendor misidentified our needs. The solution they sold us could not back up our Oracle databases as per specification, which did not become apparent until after procurement. That put us in a very difficult position,” said Stephen Larkins, Operations Manager, Bakwena.

Veritas steps in with a mature, trusted solution

The key criteria in Bakwena’s software selection process:

Veritas topped the list, rolling out a proof of concept (POC) within three weeks. The POC was successful, and the confidence of the Veritas team helped build trust with Bakwena’s IT staff.

“The maturity of Veritas means they’ve seen it all before. When we explained our issues, their answer was: ‘We’ve got this,’ with no hesitation. Veritas Services has been phenomenal; they’ve been a breath of fresh air,” said Larkins.

Better-managed backups and much faster recovery

Following the POC, Bakwena engaged Veritas Professional Services to deploy a Veritas NetBackup Appliance in its primary data centre.

Once data is compressed and transferred to the appliance, it is hardware-agnostic. For secondary backups, the appliance replicates to a NetBackup instance running on third-party hardware in the corporate disaster recovery (DR) site.

Bakwena has not yet needed to recover data from the DR site, but expects these benefits once further testing has been completed:

To learn more, visit Veritas NetBackup Appliances or call us at +27 11 020 5250.

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Veritas Technologies is a global leader in enterprise data management. Over fifty thousand enterprises - including 90% of the Fortune 500 - rely on us to abstract IT complexity and simplify data management. Our Enterprise Data Services Platform automates the protection and orchestrates the recovery of data everywhere it lives, ensures 24/7 availability of business critical applications, and provides enterprises with the insights they need to comply with evolving data regulations. With a reputation for reliability at scale and a deployment model to fit any need, Veritas supports more than 500 data sources and over 150 storage targets, including 50 clouds. Learn more at www.veritas.com. Follow us on Twitter at @veritastechllc.

Editorial contacts

Jolene Devine
Marketing Manager
(+27) 82 461 6542
jolene.devine@veritas.com