How Global Business Modula Elevated Disaster Recovery

As an IT manager, I feel like I have an enormous responsibility on my hands: to ensure reliable IT services to teams across the world. To achieve that, I needed to shore up my company’s network and disaster recovery (DR) with solutions that worked both locally and globally.

As Group Information Systems Manager, I lead IT across Modula, the leading designer and manufacturer of automatic vertical and horizontal warehouses. We are based in Italy but have a truly global footprint as we employ more than 1,000 people worldwide at our five production plants in Italy, the United States, and China, along with our subsidiaries in another 12 countries. 

Playing a dangerous game with DR

Up until 2016, Modula was part of a larger group. When we became an independent company after an acquisition, we had to detach Modula’s IT from our former parent. So, in 2019, we set up our Italian data center, which is also Modula’s data center for all manufacturing plants and subsidiaries for core services like SAP. 

If a company’s single data center goes down, the entire business is in trouble. We tried to physically protect the data center as much as possible, but it was still a single location. Earthquakes were a particular concern in the region where our headquarters is located.

We of course had backups, though we never had reason to use them. If we did, I estimate it would have taken us hours or even days to recover data from our most important servers. But the cost of a disaster is more than the time it takes to restore. It’s also the point of erasure: How much data will you lose, and what will be the damage?

I think about a system like our ERP: Losing five minutes wouldn’t be terrible; losing hours of work from all employees across the world would be a nightmare.

While our major consideration was the financial cost, we also had to take into account the legal and compliance issues of trying to recover lost information. It would be difficult to recreate lost documents we need for legal or fiscal reasons, for example. We could get everything back online, but not fixing those documents 100% correctly would land us in trouble with local authorities where Modula does business. The weight of that would fall to me. I wanted a better way to ensure business continuity.

The freedom to choose the best partner

Once Modula became its own entity, we realized we were the masters of our own destiny. We weren’t tied to a parent company’s decisions anymore, and our need for improved solutions was also an opportunity to reevaluate our partnerships. We were looking for reliability in both a partner and the solutions.

We also needed a partner with a global presence to match Modula’s own. Whatever solution we bought in Italy, we wanted the same for Mexico, Singapore, and Australia. We knew we could save some money if we allowed each country to pick their own solutions, but what we would save in the short term, we would lose in our ability to work globally. That requirement immediately narrowed the list of vendors. That's when Modula’s IT partner, Var Group, started a conversation about HPE.

HPE is a well-known name and I’ve enjoyed working with them in the past, so I felt comfortable starting a pilot in 2022 to address the network needs at one of our subsidiaries. Nothing happens without a reliable partner, and working with HPE was a great experience. We decided to deepen our relationship, working with HPE as we "refreshed" our offices, updating the data center for one of our manufacturing facilities in the US and for our new Italian HQ.

Seizing the opportunity to build a second data center

One of our key requirements was a way to control our global network from Italy. We have a few IT colleagues who control their networks locally in the US and China, but we needed the capability to jump in and control everything, supporting these and other teams anywhere in the world. We found that in HPE Aruba, which has made our lives so much easier, especially for configuration changes.

Then, in 2023, we got the opportunity to create a secondary data center for DR, essentially giving us two headquarters located in Salvaterra and Fiorano (Italy). For this new facility, we would use HPE hardware and software, including HPE Alletra 6000 Series storage, HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen11 servers, and Zerto for continuous data protection and recovery. HPE Alletra 6000 and ProLiant are both powered by AMD EPYC processors.

We decided to focus on the most important workloads: the services that need to be always up and running. Some of them, like our Active Directory, don’t require up-to-the-minute synching. The data doesn’t change that frequently—we might make a few updates and then nothing happens for a few days. In that case, a daily backup is more than enough. For continuous syncing in our second data center we prioritized the most critical services including, for example, our ERP and CRM.

Now, the most important servers are constantly in sync with the new data center. We could restart these servers in a few minutes, and they would be in sync until the last second, which for our core services could make all the difference.

DR that’s more than just backups

In the old days, it was common practice to perform a full test system restore from tapes at least once a year. Several tapes always failed. Technology has come a long way since then, but there’s still that small worry: “What if our recovery systems fail?” Now, I don’t have that worry. With Modula’s set of HPE solutions, reliability is our strength. As long as one data center is operational, business can continue.

The disasters are changing, too. When we talk about DR, we often think of natural disasters like earthquakes or fire, but these days it’s more likely to be ransomware. The human who mistakenly clicked on a cleverly disguised email is the key point of failure, and the disaster is someone getting into your systems and creating chaos. Fortunately, Zerto gives us a big advantage, allowing us to easily detect when something has changed in the environment.

Zerto offers more than just backups. Backups are like photos: You can take them at a chosen frequency and they contain useful information, but each photo captures only a static picture of a moment in time. What if you could get the additional context of a video? Zerto is like having a never-ending video recording. Our second data center is continuously syncing those business-critical services, and we also have the option to restart from a specific past snapshot that was set up according to our needs. 

Living up to our founder’s challenge

Twenty years ago, I attended an IBM training on DR. On the first day, the instructor asked, “How much of our data can we protect?” At the time, the point of erasure could be less than a minute, but that security came with a big cost. The question persists today: How much money are you ready to spend against your risk evaluation?

Modula looks at the question a little differently. Starting with increasing the stability of our network and moving forward with our new data center, we’ve made a series of investments in HPE technology that put us in a different league from where we were before. We can access and protect our global network from a centralized location while prioritizing the systems that are most vital to our business and scale accordingly.

Modula’s founder, Mr. Franco Stefani, is an engineer in his late 70s who still enjoys coming to the office every day with brand new ideas, constantly looking to evolve our products and services. He challenges all of us to be smarter, pursue innovation, develop our IT to match the landscape, and support Modula in its continuous search for growth and excellence. In developing a better network and a more modern DR stance, this project fits the bill.