Broward County Public Schools Chooses Veeam for Backup and Protection

Broward County Public Schools replaced its legacy backup solution from Commvault Systems, Inc. with Veeam Availability Suite to eliminate the risk of data loss and modernize its backup and recovery system.

As the district’s data grew, so did the cost to protect it. Commvault’s solution proved to be slow and unreliable, making it difficult to restore critical data and comply with federal and state regulatory requirements.

To protect its data, the district replaced Commvault with the Veeam Availability Suite, enabling them to replicate data to Azure Blob and backup vSphere VMs on-premises from NetApp FAS and AFF-A300 storage snapshots for fast, local recovery. As a result, the school district is saving $80,000 annually in DR costs, with a projected estimated savings of $2.3 million over 3 years.

As the sixth largest school district in the nation, and the second largest in Florida, the district serves a diverse population of more than 271,500 students representing 170 countries and 147 languages. Established in 1962, the district operates 322 schools and employs 32,000 teachers and staff. IT relies heavily on data to not only measure students’ progress but also drive digital transformation initiatives such as incorporating personal computing devices and implementing an online curriculum for customized learning. Data, and particularly surveillance data, is critical for school security too.

Following a tragic incident that took place in 2018 at one of the district’s 76 high schools, the district prioritized data protection and governance. Prior to modernizing its backup and recovery system, Commvault’s system struggled to protect the district’s fast-growing data. The system was slow and provided unreliable backup and recovery, with the district’s backup administrator spending 70% of his time identifying failed backups, rerunning them and trying to recover from them. With slow and unreliable recovery also causing compliance challenges, the district decided to make a change.

“Data is our lifeline in more ways than one. From driving our digital transformation and providing actionable insights to keeping our curriculum new and relevant, our data was growing quickly however our legacy backup system from Commvault was becoming a liability,” said Tamecka McKay, enterprise infrastructure services manager, Broward County Public Schools. “We have a responsibility to taxpayers to deploy high-quality, affordable technology, and knew it was time for a change. Veeam is the exact opposite of Commvault. It’s intuitive, reliable and easy to use, no matter how large our data grows.“

“When deploying Veeam’s Cloud Data Management, our goal was to mitigate the risks associated with data loss and resolve each of the challenges we faced with Commvault. For example, Commvault could only replicate to identical hardware at a colocation center, which prohibited cost-saving cloud-archiving opportunities,” he said. “With Veeam, backing up and recovering from NetApp storage snapshots is unbelievably fast and easy. We have complete confidence that our data is protected in every IT system supported by the infrastructure team, including our ERP system that supports payroll for our teachers and staff.“

The Veeam 2020 Data Protection Trends Report notes that 95% of organizations suffer outages that last, on average, almost 2 hours, and 44% say downtime from outages has damaged their brand and integrity.

Veeam provides Broward County Public Schools with a scalable enterprise data protection and management solution, that safeguards the district’s growing data.

It helps to ensures the district can maintain compliance with federal and state regulatory requirements including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Florida’s Sunshine Law.

By providing monitoring and reporting, the software vendor provides the district with the capabilities it needs to resolve IT issues before they develop into problems. Veeam’s flexibility means it integrates with any hardware, software and storage, enabling the district to replicate data to Azure Blob and save $80,000 annually in DR costs.

In addition to replicating, Veeam backups 4.5PB across more than 1,000 vSphere VMs on-premises from NetApp FAS and AFF-A300 storage snapshots for fast, local recovery. It also provides advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning capabilities, enabling the IT team to proactively delete old snapshots before they cause problems.

“Data is a powerful tool for school districts across the country. As the amount of data available to districts continues to grow, they need reliable solutions that enable them to quickly backup and recover data while also complying with federal and state regulatory requirements. Recognizing the limitations and challenges associated with their Commvault solution, Broward County Public Schools made a necessary change to protect its fast-growing data,” said Paul Strelzick, GM and SVP of Americas, Veeam. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with the district as their data continues to grow and they extend their data protection capabilities.“