Veeam Software Replacing Legacy Backup at Ivanhoe Grammar School in Australia

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Ivanhoe Grammar School has replaced its legacy backup system with its Availability Suite, including Veeam Backup & Replication, to ensure always-on availability for students, teachers, parents, and alumni in an IT environment that’s 95% virtualized.

In addition to improved availability, Veeam has also reduced backup time from two days to just a few hours, costs by 75%, and storage space by 30%.

Ivanhoe Grammar School is a multi-campus, co-educational, Anglican school in Melbourne’s East district. As an educational institution, it regularly shares important school-related communications with 2,000 students, 3,000 parents, and 200 teachers. Like many schools today, it removed the need for take-home notes and paper-based communication through the implementation of an online intranet, the responsibility of a 15-person IT team.

“We moved to a fully online environment to cater to the needs of our users, and now the pressure on our IT infrastructure has never been so great. Our services need to be available, up-and-running all the time – thousands of students, teachers, parents, and alumni depend on them,” said Matt Wojcieszak, ICT network administrator, Ivanhoe Grammar School. “In the past, we spent a lot of time and resources to double check that backups were completed with our complex legacy system. Now, with Veeam Availability Suite deployed instead, our systems are always on. It now takes a fraction of the time to verify the efficiency and completeness of backups. The time saved means we can concentrate on other infrastructure projects such as educational research, or improving the services we provide to our community. We also reduced licensing costs by 50% and administration costs by 75%, savings that can now be redirected to increasing student services and programs.”

From a more technical perspective, Ivanhoe Grammar School has improved its RPO and RTO. Before the implementation of the software, the school used two production sites and two data recovery sites with a legacy system backing up 57TB of data. The process was expensive, slow, and unreliable.

“The last thing we needed or wanted was to have 50% of a team member’s time being spent on trying to run software or just trying chase after support,” said Wojcieszak. “Too tiresome, wasteful, and expensive. Veeam Backup & Replication took only one week to test and place into production. Deploying it was so easy; we did not need advanced technical knowledge or expertise. It was a very happy and positive experience.”

“Today, people depend on their ability to access information online and this is no truer than in a school environment,” said Shaun McLagan, SVP for AsiaPac and Japan, Veeam. “Gone are the days when parents rely on hard copy notes and newsletters stuck at the bottom of their children’s school backpack to find out important news. Today’s parents expect uninterrupted communication between teachers and the wider school community and always-on availability for online services. This is the new normal. With Veeam, Ivanhoe can be a trusted information and communication resource for its community.”