American Federation of Government Employees Reduces VMware Recovery “by 80%”

TwinStrata, Inc. announced that the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employee union in the United States, has selected its CloudArray virtual appliance to provide an extension to cloud storage for its Veeam Backup & Replication software.

Recently, AFGE has experienced an acceleration in data growth and associated storage requirements in its server virtualization environment. To understand the impact of virtualization and get a handle on its storage requirements, AFGE considered all of its workload types, including email, video, audio, and small database data, and realized that its storage needs would grow exponentially.

AFGE began searching for a simple, affordable and secure offsite backup solution for its VMware infrastructure and decided Cloud Storage was the way to go. It chose Veeam Backup & Replication for its backup software, Amazon S3 as its cloud storage provider and TwinStrata’s CloudArray virtual appliance, which provided a connection to the Veeam backup software via iSCSI and delivered immediate, ‘like local’ access to Amazon cloud storage.

"The decision to move to cloud storage was certainly a lot easier once we discovered CloudArray," said Taylor Higley, IT director, AFGE. "Now that we know the backup data is successfully and securely going offsite, we can rest easily. With the deployment of CloudArray, we were able to cut our storage costs, reduce data recovery times from one week to one day, and eliminate much of the manual work of handling all those tapes resulting in a savings of one quarter of a FTE."

Since selecting CloudArray, AFGE has experienced no disruption to its existing applications. The Veeam data protection infrastructure remained intact with no requirement for a ‘rip and replace’ of software, no change to policies, and no change to schedules. The DS3 45Mbs network pipe to the cloud ensured optimum off-site backup performance for 3 to 4TB of data.

"With TwinStrata CloudArray, customers like AFGE are able to easily and securely extend Veeam’s award-winning, best-in-class backup and replication solution with the availability, flexibility and efficiency of cloud storage," stated Dan Smith, federal sales director, Veeam.