RC Willey Relies on Veeam for Disaster Recovery Strategy, Eliminating Downtime and Increasing Operational Efficiency

Veeam Data Platform enables quick recovery of RC Willey’s business-critical systems to keep its business running

Veeam® Software, the leader in Modern Data Protection, today announced that RC Willey, a leading American home furnishings company, selected Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition as the core platform for its new data protection strategy. With Veeam, RC Willey is able to keep pace with thousands of items of inventory in constant motion between its suppliers, distribution centers, stores and customers by providing the top backup and recovery solution to ensure the business never has to suffer from downtime or data loss.

Over its 90-year history, RC Willey has grown from a one-person business to a major player in the western United States, with the mission to become America’s home store of choice, now operating 10 stores and three distribution centers across California, Idaho, Nevada and Utah. With the company passing $1 billion in sales for the first time in 2021, its steady growth reflects the continued importance of its core principles: integrity, hard work and going the extra mile to satisfy each customer. Delivering on these involves a complex choreography of supply and demand, with customer orders flowing in through RC Willey’s store network and online platform, and inventory items in constant motion from suppliers to distribution centers to stores and customers’ homes.

Today, RC Willey embodies this mindset with a modern, technologically empowered organization that prioritizes efficient operations and excellent customer service. With the company’s strategic shift towards virtualizing its infrastructure, the IT team quickly realized that the total number of virtual machines they needed to manage — and protect — would start growing rapidly. Concerned that the existing backup tools wouldn’t scale to support this new landscape, the team began looking for a more powerful and versatile solution.

“The whole data protection process must be totally reliable from end to end,” said Chris Weiss, Senior Systems Administrator at RC Willey. “It doesn’t matter how fast your backups are if you can’t recover your systems within a reasonable time. And, it doesn’t matter how quick your recovery process is if the data wasn’t backed up successfully in the first place.”

After evaluating multiple solutions, RC Willey selected the Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition (Veeam Backup & Replication™ and Veeam ONE) as the core platform for its new data protection strategy. Now, RC Willey is guaranteed scalable, versatile data protection with straightforward disaster recovery in any environment. Veeam stores rich metadata with each backup, which means systems can be recovered easily in any environment, on any server, and at any location. This portability means that in the event of a catastrophe at the company’s production data center, RC Willey can be confident in restoring its systems quickly at any disaster recovery site. On top of this, Veeam provides a five-second recovery point objective [RPO] for Tier-1 systems.

“Veeam helps us recover data from almost any recovery point in almost no time. We can successfully recover files from tape backups made months ago and restore corrupted virtual machines (VMs) in 20 minutes. But the jewel in the crown is Veeam’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP). For Tier-1 systems, our RPO is just five seconds, and we can fail over to an alternate site within minutes — so we can be confident that our business-critical inventory management systems never miss a beat,” said Chris Weiss. “Visibility is great, too. Veeam ONE™ gives us real-time insight into what’s happening with our backups. It gives us richer information than other reporting tools that cost significantly more.”

The company has since expanded its use of the solution far beyond its original deployment. In addition to over 500 VMware VMs, Veeam now also protects more than 50 physical servers, and provides an air-gapped tape backup solution for long-term archiving. Most recently, RC Willey used Veeam to create a tiered backup infrastructure, using CDP features to safeguard its most critical services and virtually eliminate the risk of data loss. In addition to CDP, the company runs full backups every weekend and incremental backups on a nightly basis, protecting around 2PB of data per week.

“RC Willey is on a mission to becoming America’s home store of choice but to keep pace with growing customer demand and committing to a positive and memorable customer experience, data must be unequivocally protected and always accessible,” said John Jester, Chief Revenue Officer at Veeam. “Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition is an excellent fit because it provides unrivaled backup, reporting and recovery that keep the business running through built-in security, scalability, visibility and versatility for any IT environment.”

As RC Willey looks to move its core ERP applications onto Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® servers, embracing Veeam’s support for Linux agents is next on the priority list — and there’s potential to use Veeam for the company’s Microsoft® 365 environment. Looking ahead, the team is keeping a close eye on new Veeam features, such as SureBackup^® to confirm that all backups are recoverable, and Veeam DataLabs™ to provide sandboxed replicas for testing and patching.

Weiss will be a featured speaker during VeeamON 2023, the community event for data recovery experts, which will take place May 22 – 25 in Miami, FL and online. Designed by and built for the backup and recovery professional, attendees will expand their skills, celebrate with the community, and share industry knowledge with exclusive content from AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and more. Weiss will participate in the session Voice of the Customer: Keep Your Business Up and Running. Registration for the in-person event is now open. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com/success-stories.html.

About Veeam Software

Veeam^® provides organizations with resiliency through data security, data recovery and data freedom for their hybrid cloud. The Veeam Data Platform delivers a single solution for Cloud, Virtual, Physical, SaaS and Kubernetes environments that give businesses peace of mind their apps and data are protected and always available so that they can keep their businesses running. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, with offices in more than 30 countries, Veeam protects over 450,000 customers worldwide, including 82% of the Fortune 500 and 72% of the Global 2,000. Veeam’s global ecosystem includes 35,000+ technology partners, resellers, service providers, and alliance partners. To learn more, visit www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on LinkedIn @veeam-software and Twitter @veeam.

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