Rychiger

Rychiger – The international industrial company leverages a Veeam-based backup solution for four of its locations, both domestically and abroad.

Rychiger AG is one of the global leaders in the production of customer-specific packaging machine solutions for the coffee, tea, healthcare, grocery and pet food industries (retortable packaging). Together with Bechtle, Rychiger has implemented an impressive backup and disaster recovery infrastructure for its headquarters that is now being used in three further locations.

Project details.

Services

IT Security

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Dell Technologies, Veeam

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Challenge.

The IT managers at Rychiger AG were planning a new backup concept for the data centre at the headquarters in Steffisburg at the beginning of 2019. From the get-go, Veeam software seemed like the perfect candidate to secure the highly virtualised environment. Rychiger was looking for a new partner to realise the project.

Until that point, Rychiger had been operating a data centre that implemented a Hyper-V environment, and was looking to establish a second data centre with a hyper-converged infrastructure that leveraged Nutanix Acropolis AHV for virtualisation. Before migration into the new data centre and on to the Nutanix platform, the existing Hyper-V environment needed to be secured with Veeam Backup & Replication. The old data centre was then switched to Nutanix. Rychiger runs an Office 365 environment that also requires a backup solution, which was found in Veeam Backup for Office 365.

Solution.

Veeam was chosen as a backup platform. The manufacturer referred Urs Püntener, Rychiger’s IT Director, to Bechtle’s location in Bern. After some initial talks, Püntener was convinced that a collaboration with Bechtle would lead to a successful outcome. Together with Veeam and the partner responsible for the Nutanix platform, Amanox Solutions, Rychiger and Bechtle developed the backup project with milestones, configurations of hardware and software, along with an ambitious goal – after starting out in September 2019, the new backup solution’s deployment was planned for the end of November. This objective was met in its entirety.

Now, data backup at Rychiger works as follows – the operation of Veeam software is handled by a new physical backup server. The first backup is made on an internal disk array in RAID-6 mode with a capacity of 40 terabytes, which guarantees a low RTO for restoring the current data. Other daily, weekly, monthly and annual backups are made to a tape library according to the “grandfather-father-son” scheme. For the backup of the Nutanix environment, there’s a VM running for Veeam in each cluster and a Veeam Guest Agent for each virtual machine that works together with the backup server.
The backup process is divided into three jobs. The daily main backup job backs up the majority of the infrastructure and is defined as a forward-incremental-forever backup with 30 restore points – coinciding with the required retention time of one month. Two other jobs are responsible for the backup of SQL databases and file level indexing. This requires one Veeam Agent per VM due to the current status of the integration of Nutanix and Veeam. One job covers agents that need to be backed up once a day, the second runs several times a day. Bechtle supported Rychiger in planning the backup concept, the RTOs and RPOs and the configuration of the Veeam solutions, procured the hardware and software and contributed its Veeam expertise. This scalable concept allows the connection of further locations at any time, requiring only an additional cluster and a WAN connection.

The backup solution for the headquarters worked so well that the company decided to equip its subsidiaries, Zellwag Pharmtech in Frauenfeld, Formeleon (POL) and Nuspark (CAN), with the same hardware and software. Bechtle was responsible for installing the hardware and integrating it into the IT environment at the Frauenfeld location. The systems for Poland were assembled by Bechtle and delivered by Rychiger via inter-company transport. Bechtle also provided and shipped the hardware for export to Canada. After installation and connection to the Formeleon and Nuspark networks on site, Bechtle’s specialists were able to complete the configuration remotely.

As an SME, we lay great focus on working with our suppliers as equals. Due to our great mutual trust, we were able establish a partnership with Bechtle that allowed us to work successfully and professionally, even in difficult projects and working situations. The costs were lower than expected and there were no hidden follow-up costs. We’re already working on extending this partnership and the solution.

Urs Püntener, IT Director, Rychiger AG

Business Benefits.

With the Veeam-based backup infrastructure, Rychiger has obtained a modern, future-proof and customised backup and disaster recovery solution at enterprise level for its IT environment at four locations. An important point to note is that Rychiger’s IT team specifically wanted a solution that makes them feel comfortable and that they enjoy working with. Bechtle contributed greatly to this by offering the required training and knowledge transfer.