Junghans Group Simplifies Data Management and Accelerates Protection for SAP with Actifio

Munich – 29 January, 2015 – Actifio, the Copy Data Virtualisation Company,

has another new customer in the DACH region: The Junghans Group. Based in Aachen, the group operates two mail-order companies, Junghans Wollversand GmbH & Co. KG and Pro Idee GmbH & Co. KG, and was in need of a new solution for data backup and disaster recovery. The old data backup systems – based on LTO tape libraries and antiquated backup software – could no longer cope with the growing demands of the business. The Junghans Group therefore decided it was time for a more up-to-date solution and opted for Actifio CDS™ (Copy Data Storage).

The Junghans Group was primarily concerned with increasing resiliency by safeguarding against data loss and enabling disaster recovery. The new solution also effectively satisfies demand for increased availability. The Aachen mail-order company has to manage massive data sets with escalating growth. A total data volume of 50TB needs to be backed up on 60 systems, 40 of which have been virtualised using VMware. Consolidating the IT landscape in order to reduce complexity and administrative burden while safeguarding the compatibility of the existing SAP environment and other IT systems was an additional challenge. Jungshans IT managers’ wish list also included future security and expandability.

Actifio offers data management for large-scale heterogeneous environments. Its solutions support a broad range of applications, operating systems and storage systems from third-party vendors and are designed to protect nearly a petabyte of application data per system. The turnkey solution includes the Actifio software and a fault-tolerant redundant platform for data mirroring. Actifio CDS integrates seamlessly into any data centre, and is known for rapid implementation and easy operation with unique data transfer management via SLAs (Service Level Agreements). These can be easily set up in just a few clicks and adjusted at any time.

“We explored all the data backup solutions offered by a variety of different manufacturers. Nothing met our requirements as well as Actifio”, says Bastian Strümpel, IT Specialist and Project Manager at the Junghans Group. The Kempen-based IT consulting and service provider Blue Consult was instrumental in the recent successful deployment of Actifio. “Overall, deployment was highly successful. We were especially pleased by the high level of expertise and dedication of all the parties involved. It took just few days from the start of the deployment phase until the system was up and fully operational”, adds Strümpel.

The Junghans Group can now easily copy its SLAs using Actifio directly. “We backup our production SAP systems every 15 minutes, an incredibly short time interval. Backing up current inventory and transaction data is extremely important for a mail-order company. So we decided to house Actifio in a safe rack in a different building. In the event of a data centre failure or individual system collapse, our Actifio system allows us to reboot business-critical IT services quickly from a different location so our employees can access them. Actifio only takes five minutes to re-deploy our multi-terabyte SAP system”, says Strümpel.

Clear status reports make the daily monitoring process fast and easy. It just takes a few mouse clicks to add new systems, recover individual data sets or even entire systems. And the process does not affect the availability of the production systems. Actifio also allows for rapid deployment of test systems and supports system copies in the SAP environment.

Mario Staas, Head of IT Services at the Junghans Group, expressed overall satisfaction: “Working with Actifio is incredibly easy, so it takes pressure off our team. Actifio is extremely reliable. Employees from all departments benefit from the rapid data recovery and extremely limited data loss in the event of a disaster. Actifio’s ability to meet demanding SLAs benefits us as a company, and our customers profit indirectly as well.”

About Junghans Group

In 1950 Erhard Junghans opened his store in Aachen. This was the foundation for the Junghans wool mail-order house, which was then established in 1954. Through diversification, in 1985 the mail-order specialist Pro Idee was established. Today, the Junghans Group is active in Germany as well as several European countries. Junghans Group is under the direction of Dieter Junghans (Managing Partner) and Ulf Bergjohann (CEO). For more information, see http://www.junghanswolle.de and http://www.proidee.de.

About Actifio

Actifio delivers copy data virtualisation to hundreds of global enterprise customers and service provider partners in more than 30 countries around the world. Our Virtual Data Pipeline™ technology decouples data from infrastructure, enabling dramatic improvements in business resiliency, agility, and access to the cloud. Actifio replaces siloed data management applications with a radically simple, application-centric, SLA-driven approach that lets customers capture data from production applications, manage it more economically, and use it when and where they need to. Actifio is headquartered just outside Boston, Massachusetts, and can be reached via the web (actifio.com), Twitter (@actifio), or email at info@actifio.com