Gruppo Star S.p.A., founded in 1995 by professionals who were already working in the gift item industry, has developed rapidly to its current structure, which sees it as a leader in Italy in the import and distribution of gift items with artistic connotations and home decorating accessories.
The scenario:
However, the company is not classifiable only as an import firm because, having invested since 1997 in China in the establishment of three joint ventures, it is constantly and strongly engaged in manufacturing as well. Beginning in 1998, also in China, three strategic offices, in Guangzhou, Shanghai and Fuzhou, were also established to support the design and development of new lines and to directly follow the entire import cycle.
In Italy it owns 48,000MQ of covered warehouses between Genoa, Silvano d’Orba and in Capriata d’Orba.
The business challenge:
By 2024, Gartner predicts that companies with a networked infrastructure for cybersecurity will reduce the cost of security incidents by 90 percent and estimates that many companies will find themselves forced to pay 2.7 million within three years for attacks they suffer. Hence the clear idea of wanting to preserve data and to optimize and streamline backups.
Solution:
Star Group chose ExaGrid as an unparalleled, cost-effective and scalable solution. Installing and configuring ExaGrid; creating and bringing online four new proxies for Backup built with VeeamV12; rationalizing existing backups and backups through Veeam of the two remote sites: this is how R1 Group, which brought ExaGrid’s unique Tiered Backup Storage architecture and a unique customer service model to Italy, met Star Group’s needs.
Ensuring that an organization’s data is always intact and available for recovery is key to business continuity, in the event of disaster or malicious attack. ExaGrid’s unique multi-tiered backup storage architecture sets it apart from other solutions for a number of good reasons. ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage stores backups in the Landing Zone, which acts as a write cache. For this reason, most recovery operations are faster because the data do not have to be rehydrated or decompressed. They are deduplicated, compressed and stored in the Repository Tier for long-term storage only when the backup job is finished. Adaptive deduplication is used, which greatly reduces space utilization and saves storage cost. ExaGrid’s Repository Tier is unique because it does not face the network-this creates a virtual vacuum for greater protection of the data that are stored in the Repository Tier become absolutely immutable objects. With ExaGrid’s Retention Time-Lock feature, Star Group can now set a delayed deletion policy, so that if cybercriminals initiate a ransomware attack, the data stored in the Repository Tier will not be encrypted or deleted, and backup data will always be available for recovery.
Results:
Star Group now has the layered backup storage solution not connected to the network and with delayed erasure. This ensures, after a ransomware attack, easy recovery of data and Virtual Machines, which through Veeam’s Instant Restore feature can be started on the ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage system, then moved to the actual storage and greatly reduce downtime. With the most recent copy of all backups stored in the unique ExaGrid disk cache target area, Virtual Machine booting and recovery is now 20 times faster than other solutions.
Statement
“Significant reduction in backup times, in the range of 30 to 40 percent, and simplification of backup storage management are the immediate benefits we have seen.”
Antonio Caiazzo – IT Manager at Star Group