Japan’s leading telecommunications carrier, KDDI Corporation, has unified its backup methodology for its more than 200 virtual machines (VM) with enterprise disaster recovery software provider Veeam’s solutions to improve operations and protect the company’s critical services for its social infrastructure.
KDDI develops a variety of solutions for individuals and corporations, supported by its cloud platform CKKB for internal use and cloud service platform KCPS for corporate customers.
Providing multiple platforms like infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and hardware-as-a-service (HaaS) to meet various business needs, it has performed backups via different methods using standard backup tools from VMware.
This resulted in increased operational management load, outpouring challenges in unifying and restructuring its backup systems.
KDDI’s general manager for the platform technology department, Takeshi Maehara, said the company was able to unify the backup methods for each platform with Veeam's backup and replication solution.
“We could combine backup methods and reduce operational management load by moving the back-up of the management server group to Veeam,” he added.
The team had also deployed a new script that could coordinate between their teams for smooth operations, allowing each user to freely manage backup and restore jobs.
The company has also enjoyed other benefits such as simplifying backups, improving user experience and ensuring immutable data.
Though KDDI terminated its engagement with VMWare’s standard backup tool, the use of VMware’s virtualisation infrastructure has pushed the need for new solutions to integrate with the VMware environment, Maehara said.
“Veeam can be used in the VMware vSAN environment. It provided excellent operability, and abundant backup/restore functions,” he added.
Moreover, Veeam’s portable and transferable licensing model has allowed the company to use them both internally and for corporate cloud customers.
Customer benefits
With Veeam solution focussing on its 3-2-1-1-0 rule of maintaining at least three copies of data, on two different types of media, with one copy being off-site, one copy offline and verifying backups with 0 errors, we could achieve "great" results in expanding Veeam to the cloud for our corporate customers, Maehara explained.
As the first step, KDDI has developed a service that backs up virtual servers. It has also added a new menu for backing up Microsoft 365 data.
On the future plans, Maehara said that KDDI intends to explore more capabilities with Veeam.
While a Kubernetes-based container platform is in operation internally to help KDDI evolve its cloud transformation, it is also considering the data management platform Kasten K10.
Targeting to provide new Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) services, KDDI said it intends to explore solutions to back up various resources scattered on the network.
