Sioux County Iowa Switch From Backup Exec to AppAssure Replay 4

AppAssure
Software, Inc. announced that Sioux County, a county in the northwest
corner of Iowa and a home to 33,704 residents, moved from Symantec Backup Exec
to AppAssure’s Replay 4 backup and recovery software to overcome regular
recovery failures, painfully slow restores, and no possibility of virtual
backup. With Replay 4, Sioux
County is reported to
achieve 33% storage space savings and a 596% ROI.

Micah Van Maanen, Sioux
County’s Information Technology
Director, and his team make sure IT infrastructure supports the integrated
needs of Sioux County. "Anything that is on the
network, we are responsible for," explains Van Maanen. "This includes
all the help desk needs, the website support, and all network issues.
Increasingly, we were using Symantec’s Backup Exec and having hiccups in our
backup routine, and Backup Exec restores were becoming painfully slow. We were
devoting more and more time to something that should have just been
routine."

As Van Maanen explains, Sioux County
looked at several different solutions, such as Veeam and Quest vRanger Pro, but only
AppAssure’s Replay, with its backup and disaster recovery solutions for
government agencies, gave the county the ability to backup both virtual and
physical servers, along with rapid restores at a price point that made sense
for their needs.

According to Van Maanen, his team uses Replay’s
advanced disk imaging ability to make sure all Sioux County’s data is securely
protected. By setting the incremental backup snaps to every 15 minutes, Van
Maanen’s team can perform quick restores. "With Replay, we now
know we have a good backup. If something happens, we have current data and can
restore to a physical or virtual machine," says Van Maanen. "This has
made Sioux County’s disaster recovery planning
extremely easy as well. With virtualization, we’re not hardware-dependent, and
with Replay, we have the ability to restore a complete server quickly because
our virtual machines are backed up every 15 minutes. For example, if something
were to happen, we’d still be able to run payroll the next day and get people
paid on time."

As Sioux
County’s IT Director
says, he is impressed by storage space savings he is seeing. "Previously,
our backup storage would be full after just two weeks of nightly backups,"
he says. "Now we can fit ninety-six 15-minute snapshots, 48 hourly
snapshots, 7 daily snapshots, 4 weekly snapshots, and one monthly snapshot for
every server, and we are using only 33% of our disk space! I was shocked and
really impressed with the data and the number of snaps we could fit."

As for Sioux
County’s Return on
Investment with Replay, Van Maanen adds, "We actually didn’t do any ROI
before we bought Replay because we had done the budgeting for this. But I am
surprised with the savings, especially in terms of staff time savings. This
frees us up to work on other projects, and means we have less time here in the
evenings. Plus, Monday mornings are more pleasant as well!"

This year, Sioux
County will be seeing a
third machine up to handle virtual replication for more comprehensive
disaster recovery, says Van Maanen. "Backup and disaster recovery problems
are no longer worries. Replay is saving us time, resources, and money,"
sums up Van Maanen.