Healthcare Organisation Cwm Taf Health Board Prescribes Veeam

Challenge:

• Limited DR capabilities in the legacy backup tool could not protect a multi-hypervisor environment.

Results:

• More frequent backups and faster recovery
• Realizing the true benefits of v irtualization
• Built-in features save time and money

The Business Challenge
The Cwm Taf Health Board chose virtualisation for three reasons: protect critical data, optimise datacentre costs and maximise efficiencies. When the health board’s ICT team struggled to backup and recover VMs with the same backup tool used to backup physical servers, team members applied the same three requirements when searching for a new backup and recovery solution.

“We could only backup our VMs once a day with the legacy backup tool because of backup speed issues, and we couldn’t restore VMs on the fly, which severely limited our DR capabilities,” said Matt Palmer, head of server management, Cwm Taf Health Board. “Because of the nature of 24×7 healthcare, our goal was to mitigate recovery risks before they became issues.“

Palmer and his colleagues look after more than 100 Hyper-V and vSphere VMs in two datacentres. Instead of investing in agents for the legacy backup tool, as well as installing, monitoring and managing them in each VM to be backed up and restored, they looked for a more cost-effective solution that would enable them to protect their multi-hypervisor environment.

“When we saw what Veeam Backup & Replication offered it was a no-brainer,” Palmer said. “It’s not often you see a demonstration in the IT world that blows you away, but that’s what happened when we saw Veeam in action. It is absolutely fantastic what Veeam can do for the money.“

Veeam Solution
The Cwm Taf Health Board replaced its legacy backup tool with Veeam Backup & Replication because it exceeded the organisation’s requirements for its virtual environment: protect data, optimise datacentre costs and maximise efficiencies. The legacy tool continues to backup the health board’s physical servers.

Built specifically for virtualisation, Veeam protects multi-hypervisor VMs running the health board’s critical applications and data through fast, frequent backup and quick, reliable recovery.

“Veeam offers such fast backup that we can backup all of our VMs two to three times a day rather than once a day as we did with the legacy tool,” said Ian Alden, server manager, Cwm Taf Health Board. “Restoring VMs with Veeam is much faster too. When an archive server went down, we restored it in under five minutes. The legacy tool would have taken at least a day. With Veeam’s performance, we can meet just about any recovery point or RTO (RPO and RTO).“

Veeam Backup & Replication optimises datacentre costs, ICT team’s second criterion.
“Veeam Software delivered a complete virtualisation solution and five years of maintenance that was 60% less expensive than what the legacy backup tool vendor could deliver with one year of maintenance,” Palmer said. “We have two streams of finance: capital and revenue, and due to austerity measures put in place by the government, we have to reduce our revenue costs.“

Another way Veeam helps optimise datacentre costs is through its built-in deduplication and compression. When the ICT team combines deduplication in Windows Server 2012 with Veeam’s built-in deduplication and compression, backup storage requirements will decrease. Most organisations experience extensive storage savings as well. Furthermore, Veeam is storage-agnostic, so it doesn’t matter what storage is used in production or as the backup repository. Veeam’s additional built-in features help the health board maximise efficiencies-the third criterion. Veeam provides built-in multi-hypervisor support, making it fast and easy for the ICT team to backup and recover VMs using one solution. It also makes granular recovery fast and easy. Veeam Explorer for Exchange lets administrators browse, search and selectively export items, such as emails, notes and contacts.

“One of the reasons we decided to virtualise Exchange is because we knew we could offer fast brick-level restore with Veeam,” Alden said. “Before deploying Veeam, we had to tell users we couldn’t restore their lost Exchange items because the process was prohibitively lengthy with the legacy tool-taking at least a day-and we didn’t have the luxury of extra time. Soon we’ll promote Exchange recovery as a benefit the ICT team can deliver.“

Another built-in feature that enables Veeam to maximise efficiencies is On-Demand Sandbox. It lets the ICT team run VMs from a backup in an isolated virtual lab for testing or troubleshooting. Alden said the team plans to use it to test software patches and updates before deploying them in production.

“We can also use On-Demand Sandbox when support companies come onsite to do a complete upgrade of their systems,” he continued. “If we’re dealing with critical clinical data, we want to be sure the system upgrade goes smoothly. Veeam could save us hours or even days of inconvenience.“

The ICT team also plans to use Veeam’s built-in replication feature. Veeam replicates VMs onsite for HA and offsite for DR. The team will replicate critical VMs between datacentres for DR.

“Again, our goal is to be proactive in our virtual environment, and Veeam offers many proactive capabilities, such as replication,” Alden said. “Veeam is an exceptional product in a crowded marketplace. It’s easy and straightforward to use. Veeam does exactly what it says on the tin.“

The Results:

More frequent backups and faster recovery
Because the legacy backup tool at Cwm Taf Health Board was not built specifically for virtualisation, VMs running critical applications and data were at risk. Backup and recovery were slow and unreliable, and members of the ICT team felt they couldn’t proactively protect their multi-hypervisor environment. Veeam Backup & Replication gives them peace of mind: not only can they backup VMs more frequently, they can restore VMs much faster, enabling them to meet RPOs and RTOs.

Realizing  benefits of virtualization
Retrofitting the health board’s legacy backup tool would have resulted in limited capabilities, lots of complexity and additional cost. The ICT team knew it couldn’t realise the true benefits of virtualisation until it deployed modern data protection. Veeam Backup & Replication is powerful (restores an entire VM or an individual file, email or database record from the same image-level backup), easy-to-use (no agents to licence, deploy, monitor or maintain) and affordable (simple per-socket licencing and reduced storage consumption).

Built-in features save time and money
Veeam’s built-in features save several hours each day in backup and recovery, as well as space in backup storage, which translates to extensive storage savings. In addition, Veeam Backup & Replication was 60% less expensive than the legacy backup tool.