CASE STUDY

In November 2020, the group acquired the Walmart business in Argentina and relaunched it as GDN Argentina.

“ Walmart first set up shop in Argentina in 1995, so GDN Argentina was building on a 27-year history of success,” said Martín Rodríguez Falconier, IT Director, GDN Argentina. costs by standardizing on a single toolset that worked for our hybrid environment. But it was vital that we made the right choice of solution, since any downtime or worse, data loss, could affect our retail performance.”

The Veeam Solution

GDN Argentina selected Veeam to help ensure high data availability for its omnichannel retail operations. The company made its decision following a rigorous comparison of Veeam with competing options including Veritas.

“ Now, we had the chance to incorporate the de Narváez Group’ s experience in the Latin American market to improve our offering.”

Under the terms of the acquisition, GDN Argentina was tasked with separating its IT operations from Walmart over a few months. In the short term, the company’ s IT team sought to minimize disruption across all its retail channels. At the same time, GDN Argentina looked to optimize its IT infrastructure to enable sustained growth.

“ The launch of GDN Argentina was the ideal time to rationalize and standardize our IT on optimal technologies,” said Rodríguez Falconier.

“ We wanted cost-efficient solutions that wouldn’ t limit our future options.”

GDN Argentina identified data protection as a key priority area. The company relies on non-stop availability of data to keep goods in stock, ensure on-time deliveries, provide a seamless shopping experience across every sales touchpoint, and more.

“ We were using Veeam to back up our on-premises systems and Veritas to protect our cloud cluster,” said Rodriguez Falconier.“ We realized that we could cut our

“ Veeam is much simpler to use than Veritas and other data protection solutions,” said Rodríguez Falconier.“ The Veeam team showed us how we could back up our entire hybrid environment through Veeam, greatly simplifying our data protection strategy.”

Today, GDN Argentina employs Veeam at both its primary datacenter, located at its headquarters, and its secondary site at its distribution center. The company backs up a total of 200 Linux and Microsoft Windows virtual machines( VMs) running on-premises. Working with Veeam partner Wetcom – specialists in putting the use of virtualization and cloud computing technologies into practice – the company extended backups to its cloud cluster, enabling a single point of control for data protection for the company and all its locations.

“ We always have a great experience working with Wetcom,” said Rodríguez Falconier.“ They respond fast to any questions and help us articulate the business benefits of technology. Thanks to Veeam and Wetcom, we now back up data for all our 90-plus stores around Argentina as well as our distribution center and corporate headquarters both daily and incrementally. Veeam backups are so comprehensive that we could even afford to space them out a little more.”

With just one data backup and replication solution to manage, GDN Argentina’ s IT team can work much more efficiently, confident that business-critical applications including Oracle ERP for Retail and Microsoft 365 are well-protected. Veeam has already proved itself a vital tool in supporting business continuity at GDN Argentina.

“ Every experience we’ ve had restoring data with Veeam has been impeccable,” said Rodríguez Falconier.“ That allows us to ensure that our customers get the same great experience regardless of what channel they use to engage with us. Veeam has also streamlined management for data protection dramatically, while giving us enhanced capabilities.”

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