Florida-Based Child Care Provider R’Club Opts for Veeam and iland

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that R’Club Child Care, Inc. (R’Club), a not-for-profit child care provider in the Tampa Bay, FL, is using Veeam Cloud Connect with iland Internet Solutions Corporation, a platinum Veeam cloud service provider, for DR as a service (DRaaS).

Serving more than 4,000 infants, preschool, elementary and middle school children in 47 locations, R’Club provides quality, accessible and affordable learning and development programs that strengthen children, families and their communities. It was established in 1976, employs 400 people and prides itself on providing reliable child care for the community, which can be a challenge given the rough weather in the Sunshine State.

Florida has experienced more hurricanes than any other state in the US, and, since 1851, there have been just 18 seasons in which a hurricane did not make landfall in the Sunshine State. Indeed, two of the three North Atlantic hurricanes to make landfall in the US as a category 5 during the 20th century hit Florida (the 1935 Labor Day hurricane and Hurricane Andrew in 1992).

When first responders have to take action during hurricane season, someone has to take care of their children. And in Tampa Bay, many of their children go to R’Club.

“We can’t operate our child care centers without fully responding IT,” said Michael Brunner, IT coordinator, R’Club. “When we’re called on to step up during a natural disaster, our IT systems can’t fail. If they do fail, we can’t stay operational, and we fail to serve our first responders, their children and our community.“

To keep IT systems running 24.7.365 – even during a hurricane – R’Club deployed Veeam Availability Suite on site for fast backup and recovery. But for DR, R’Club’s NAS device transferred backup copies off site to a service provider. If R’Club’s data center was swept away by a hurricane, the service provider could restore data through Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS).

In practice, however, transferring backup copies from the NAS to the service provider was error-prone, making recovery unreliable. It might take hours or days to restore critical IT systems, and R’Club couldn’t take that risk. R’Club had made a commitment to take care of first responders’ children so they can take care of the community.

“One of our most critical systems is email,” Brunner said. “If email fails and we can’t recover it quickly from a backup, staying in touch with staff and partner agencies becomes a major issue. Email must be always available, especially during a hurricane.“

Veeam Cloud Connect Solution
It enables Veeam customers to point their backups or replicas to a service provider’s cloud. In this case, R’Club chose to take advantage of Veeam Cloud Connect to partner with iland. Using the Veeam console, R’Club replicates VMs supporting critical IT systems to iland’s secure cloud. If a hurricane destroys R’Club’s data center, iland will trigger a failover so R’Club can access critical IT systems in minutes, not hours or days as with its previous system.

“Veeam and iland provide us with our first all-inclusive DR strategy,” Brunner said. “Plus, periodic DR tests give us confidence we can recover quickly in a real disaster. We’ve never had this level of BC before.“

Benefits of the solution include:

• A DR strategy: R’Club uses Veeam to backup and recover critical IT systems in its data center. If data center is swept away by a hurricane, iland will recover IT systems quickly from its cloud so R’Club can remain operational and care for the children of first responders.
• A new level of BC: Before Veeam and iland, R’Club spent hours or days recovering critical IT systems. Now recovery is fast and easy, keeping R’Club up and running in a crisis.
• Lower cost while delivering 24.7.365 Availability: Not only is the new DR strategy more cost-effective, R’Club can count on 24.7.365 Availability of IT systems for the first time.

“As a non-profit organization, we don’t have funds to spare,” Brunner said. “We prefer to invest our resources in our programs and in our community. Veeam and iland help us do that by giving us a more cost-effective DR plan and a new level of BC.“

“Veeam Cloud Connect and iland provide organizations of all sizes with a reliable and fast DRaaS solution, enabling customers to set up offsite DR without breaking the bank,” said Peter McKay, president and COO, Veeam. “Cloud has been the fastest growing segment of our business for the last several years, and it’s no surprise as to why: we’re solving the problem of setting up offsite DR by partnering with trusted advisors that our customers already know well. Thanks to Veeam and iland, R’Club can face hurricane season without any worry about keeping its IT systems available 24.7.365.“