Veeam Providing Hastings District Council With Always-On Availability

Hastings District Council can ensure that its online services are Always-On for residents and has set itself up for future growth, by streamlining its IT environment using an enterprise data management platform from Veeam Software, Inc.

The council serves nearly 75,000 citizens and has 550 employees across 17 sites. A large proportion of the data held on file at the council is residents’ information, such as house plans, consents and registrations. As with most government agencies, the council also provides online services to residents, making it critical that systems are up and running whenever users need them. Downtime results in lost revenue or worse, angry residents.

“Now, more than ever, availability at scale is a priority for organisations of all kinds, including local government councils,” said Shaun McLagan, SVP, AsiaPac and Japan, Veeam. “Consumers and residents have come to expect council information and services to be available to them online 24 hours a day. From parking information, to recycling, to street closures, to booking a pick-up – councils must embrace digital transformation to provide its residents with the level of service and availability they expect.“

The council, however, was facing more and more issues due to an ageing storage and backup solution which could no longer scale to meet growth capacities. As business units created growing amounts of media rich data, disk space requirements were increasing. IT staff was using multiple software systems to create the backup, as well as specialised software for the SQL database backups. Overall, the significant amount of time and resources spent on manual intervention required to maintain day-to-day operations resulted in high operational costs and took IT staff away from other tasks.

“Maintaining the systems was terrible,” said Joshua King, infrastructure support officer, Hastings District Council. “The previous architecture used a mix of different software to backup and restore critical council and resident information. It wasn’t reliable and consumed quite a lot of my time to babysit it, checking it, and fixing the backups.“

The council needed a solution. Datacom Group Ltd, a Veeam partner which the council has worked with for more than a decade, won the request for proposal. The solution uses Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise Plus and Veeam Cloud Connect to ensure robust, quick backups and constant availability, while reducing complexity and freeing staff to focus on IT operations to help improve the council’s business and offerings to residents.

“The two main drivers in us choosing Veeam were the reliability of the backup solution in its entirety and the ability to scale as our storage increases,” King said.

The Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise Plus solution has reduced the time Hastings District Council spends monitoring the backup process. Backup times for 28.5TB of data have reduced by 88%, from more than 16 hours to less than two hours, and the number of backup management tools used has been cut from 4 to just 1, reducing complexity, risk and staff training requirements.

A subset of important servers is replicated to a Veeam Cloud Connect service provider (TIMG). Deduplication and compression means the Council is currently using only 12TB of their 20TB capacity.

“When we need to do a restoration,” said King. “It just happens. I can confidently tell our users that if a file was once where they said it was, then we will get it back for them. I have full confidence that Veeam could save the day if an incident occurred. Veeam has helped us protect not only the documents and files created by our staff for our business, but also the intellectual property of our residents, including house plans, consents and licenses.“