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Veeam Availability Suite Case Study

THE PROJECT: VEEAM AVAILABILITY SUITE

Providing clarity and confidence for Backup and Disaster Recovery with "Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise"

Our client has a Global sales presence requiring IT infrastructure in multiple data-centres around Ireland and across the globe. The company also supports 400 staff in Dublin with the full range of operations demanding 24/7 availability.
For years the IT team had leveraged “cloud based” together with on-site local backups and had relied on a third party provider, however they had little confidence with a scenario where a serious fault required a full system or large data restore. 

Due to the large number of backups across systems based both in-house and across multiple data centres the IT staff were spending an ever increasing amount of time checking backups and liaising with the cloud provider on issues. There was no single point of view or centralised reporting to provide effective and efficient management. 
The client having widely invested in VMware during the past 2 – 3 years throughout the company’s IT infrastructure had placed a significant focus on resilience within the eco-system however there was still a gap with unknown and sluggish recovery times in the event of a systems failure.

The final straw came when a critical finance server failed, whilst there were backups and the data was secure, it was the significant “restore time” that caused the most concern to the business

The client approached Lantech outlining their concerns and a list of requirements including:

  • reliable backup and recovery to ensure high availability of data
  • visibility into vSphere and the backup infrastructure so they could proactively resolve issues and manage IT resources

Very quickly we identified Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise as being an excellent fit, with its focus on “Availability” and removing the significant restore times of most backup solutions, Veeam would allow for rapid restores for individual files or complete VM’s within minutes rather than hours. 

With Veeam Availability Suite we could leverage “Veeam One” to deliver live monitoring and alerting, detailed reporting with configuration assessment and dashboards for “at a glance” performance and compliance,  notifications sent via email, push or SMS of the backup operations and health.

A central feature of Veeam was the ability to replicate data and entire VM’s off-site to another location where they remain available to be started up at a moment’s notice should the on-site resource be unavailable. An entire VM can be brought up in a remote data centre and appear as though it is running in the local office. This is possible due to Veeam’s Proxy service that cleverly routes the remotely restored VM’s traffic across the VPN without any IP subnet conflicts. 
The IT team simply have to push a button to bring a server up and don’t have to think about any network changes.

Providing clarity and confidence for Backup and Disaster Recovery with "Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise"

Our client has a Global sales presence requiring IT infrastructure in multiple data-centres around Ireland and across the globe. The company also supports 400 staff in Dublin with the full range of operations demanding 24/7 availability.
For years the IT team had leveraged “cloud based” together with on-site local backups and had relied on a third party provider, however they had little confidence with a scenario where a serious fault required a full system or large data restore. 

Due to the large number of backups across systems based both in-house and across multiple data centres the IT staff were spending an ever increasing amount of time checking backups and liaising with the cloud provider on issues. There was no single point of view or centralised reporting to provide effective and efficient management. 
The client having widely invested in VMware during the past 2 – 3 years throughout the company’s IT infrastructure had placed a significant focus on resilience within the eco-system however there was still a gap with unknown and sluggish recovery times in the event of a systems failure.

The final straw came when a critical finance server failed, whilst there were backups and the data was secure, it was the significant “restore time” that caused the most concern to the business

The client approached Lantech outlining their concerns and a list of requirements including:

  • reliable backup and recovery to ensure high availability of data
  • visibility into vSphere and the backup infrastructure so they could proactively resolve issues and manage IT resources

Very quickly we identified Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise as being an excellent fit, with its focus on “Availability” and removing the significant restore times of most backup solutions, Veeam would allow for rapid restores for individual files or complete VM’s within minutes rather than hours. 

With Veeam Availability Suite we could leverage “Veeam One” to deliver live monitoring and alerting, detailed reporting with configuration assessment and dashboards for “at a glance” performance and compliance,  notifications sent via email, push or SMS of the backup operations and health.

A central feature of Veeam was the ability to replicate data and entire VM’s off-site to another location where they remain available to be started up at a moment’s notice should the on-site resource be unavailable. An entire VM can be brought up in a remote data centre and appear as though it is running in the local office. This is possible due to Veeam’s Proxy service that cleverly routes the remotely restored VM’s traffic across the VPN without any IP subnet conflicts. 
The IT team simply have to push a button to bring a server up and don’t have to think about any network changes.

WHAT WE DID:

Our in-house Veeam team (VCME certified) began working with the client to deeply understand their current backup environment teasing out information such as what resources would be required?, what sites and servers would be included?, timing’s, storage etc.

Once we had a complete picture of the requirement’s, the team played back to the client the information and designed a project plan together with an infrastructure design built on HP ProLiant Server and HP MSA Storage for high-availability and Synology for medium-term and archival retention.

Lantech procured the infrastructure and deployed same in the 2 defined data warehouses acting as replication partners for data from all the other sites.

The next step was the deployment of Veeam and the detailed configuration plan devised from our initial review and subsequent collaborative sessions with the client. Once Veeam was deployed and backups together with off-site replication for DR was working we provided training to the internal IT team so that they can self-manage the backup eco-system 

 

“Having reports and alerting based not only on success / failure but on the overall health, capacity and performance of the entire Virtualised infrastructure has provided us with a much clearer perspective and a deeper understanding of how our Vsphere environment is preforming and allows us catch problems before they impact on the availability of critical systems.”

 

On the initial stages of the project, cost was a concern however very quickly we could demonstrate the “Return on Investment” with Veeam and just how affordable it is due to its model of licensing per CPU socket. There are no per-application, per-VM or per-host fees. Licenses can be purchased for any mix of hypervisors and can be swapped between hypervisors free of charge.

This compared with what was in place before where pricing was dictated by storage used per month was a breath of fresh air for the client, they no longer had to worry about adding in additional VM’s whether on a temporary basis or permanently and when storage does become tight Veeam will alert the IT team in good time and additional drives can be installed in the deployed infrastructure.

Whether you have one or a hundred hosts we’d love to speak to you about Veeam and how we can bring back the confidence in your backup, restore and availability processes.

 

TECHNOLOGIES / RESOURCES UTILISED:

Veeam VCME engineers
VMware Certified engineers
Storage and Network Architects

 

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