Study Group Proprietary Selecting Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. helps Study Group Proprietary Limited deliver near continuous access to data and applications for educational institutions across the globe.

Study Group serves international students looking for quality programs for academic success, which will enable them to develop career skills that will help them fulfill their career ambitions. The company has worked with Veeam to achieve an 80% improvement in backup coverage while reducing IT spend on backup and DR by 11%, which has delivered an approximate ROI of 45% on an annual basis.

Study Group decided to virtualize their technology environment and realized its legacy backup system was no longer supporting ever-growing business needs. In a highly competitive market and with increasing globalization, the company needed to transform its business and look to modern cloud-based IT technologies in order to stay ahead of the curve. The decision to virtualize was important to give the business flexibility in how it would deal with the shifting demand in student enrollments across the globe. The business decided on a hub-and-spoke approach, employing data centers across London, UK, Las Vegas, NE, and Sydney, Australia to balance load and ensure availability.

The virtualized concept of the three hubs is based on vSphere. With the addition of the Veeam Availability Suite into the environment, providing one-click availability and DR.

Improved DR Capability
Prior to Veeam, Study Group had a less formal and more manual DR process. The move has improved backup coverage by 80%, while the bottom line on IT spend on backup, DR and replication has been reduced by 11%. Improvement in other areas of the IT infrastructure are being made as manpower can be redirected from DR efforts.

“Availability in the Study Group business is about being able to recover data as quickly as possible and continue to do business,” said Andrew Christensen, senior systems engineer, global data centres, Study Group. “The corporate business needs to work on systems with very limited downtime. This is what we’re trying to achieve with availability as a whole, limiting the amount of time when earning potential is hampered.“

Increasing Automation, Scalability and ROI
Availability Suite ticked all the boxes for Study Group; the suite’s ease of deployment enabled the company to move to a robust, disaster-proof environment, which also reduced management overhead.

Prior to this implementation, Study Group managed DR manually. The company was reliant on the intimate knowledge of individual members of the IT team to recall where individual backups were located. The backup and recovery process relied heavily on large-scale tape drives, leading to labor-intensive operations with high maintenance costs.

“We are getting more bang for our buck with Veeam, we don’t need to invest further in our older solutions which weren’t optimized for our virtualized environment. Resourcing too has been a break-even affair. So in theory, based on our initial spend for the project, we’re thinking in a couple of years it will have paid for itself. Moving forward that is money in the bank,” said Christensen.

Cost Savings
Since the rollout, the business has seen a 60% reduction in the cost of the retention of data and storage. Application development costs have been reduced by an estimated 15% and spending on hardware has reduced by 10%. Shifting away from legacy storage methods such as tape, portable USB HDDs and manually copying data to dedicated SAN devices for backups and protection has changed the way Study Group approaches storage. While the SAN storage requirement has increased, it’s delivering more for the business at lower cost.

 “We’ve calculated a rough ROI of approximately 45% on an annual basis from [deploying] Veeam. On a day-to-day basis, the workload for the IT staff at Study Group has shifted since the Veeam rollout. The infrastructure team has been liberated to work on other projects. The time that we’ve had freed up has made us a lot more effective on each project that we do take on. That’s giving us better results as a whole,” continued Christensen.