Hit Promotional Products Ensures 24/7 System Availability with Veeam Virtualization Backup

Hit Promotional Products, the Largo, Florida-based leader in the promotional products industry, made the switch from its legacy backup solution to Veeam Backup & Replication. Providing 24/7 service is crucial for the IT department to support 900 staff members, including a mobile sales force that handles both domestic and international sales. As the company virtualized more of its servers, its legacy backup tool struggled to keep up. Veeam Backup & Replication was built specifically for VM backup and proved to be a hit.

"Our primary concern was how to back up our VMs without impacting users," said Eric Shonebarger, CIO for Hit Promotional Products. "The data kept growing and the backup window kept shrinking, and the system literally ground to a crawl during backups. It was apparent that we needed a better backup solution so we decided to give Veeam a try."

Veeam Backup & Replication was the best choice for Hit Promotional Products because it fully supports the virtual environment, and is easy to set up and run. vPower, the innovative technology that runs a VM directly from a backup file, was what sealed the deal as no other vendors reviewed could provide the capability.

Today 90-95 percent of Hit Promotional Products' systems are virtualized. The IT infrastructure includes 55 virtual machines (VMs) across four hosts that run all critical applications and services, including Microsoft Active Directory and SQL Server-based document management systems.

"In addition to the full VM restore capability, the ability to granularly restore SQL Server database records and active directory objects is a big plus," said Shonebarger. "We also use the virtual lab capability that comes with Veeam Backup & Replication to look at each VM backup individually. This gives us peace of mind that everything is working as it should be."