From Complexity to Simplicity: Improving Backup for a Government Municipality

Organization

Our customer is a government municipality located in a scenic region known for its thriving businesses, tourism, and natural attractions. Covering a significant area and serving a diverse population, the municipality faced challenges in managing their backup processes effectively.

Industry

Municipality | Government

Challenges

Before implementing our solution, the municipal organization faced significant challenges with their backup process. They relied on traditional tape libraries for backups, which proved to be expensive and complex to manage. The backups would often run for extended periods, causing delays in critical operations and hampering productivity. Additionally, the growing volume of data and the need for long-term retention posed storage and scalability concerns.

Reflecting on the situation, a key representative from the organization shared the following insights into their challenges:

“We struggled with a backup process that was slow and laborious. Backups would drag on for hours, occasionally surpassing 72 hours. Tape backups and long-term data archiving compounded the complexity, making backup storage management a daunting challenge.”

These challenges drove the organization to seek a more efficient and effective backup solution that could address their specific needs while streamlining their operations.

Solution

To address the municipality’s backup challenges and improve data protection, they implemented our backup and disaster recovery appliance, powered by Veeam technology. This comprehensive solution transformed their backup infrastructure, providing faster and more efficient data protection.

Significant improvements in backup speeds were achieved through three key factors:

• Unlimited Data Movers: The Veeam-ready appliance employed NAS-based data movers, enabling multiple backup jobs to run simultaneously. This parallel processing capability dramatically enhanced backup performance, reducing the time required for data protection tasks.
• Zero-Latency between Veeam and Storage Stack: The integration of the Veeam engine directly into the DR365V appliance eliminated latency caused by a LAN connection. With Veeam running on the appliance, backup jobs experienced zero latency, resulting in faster backups and expedited recovery operations.
• Hot/Cold Storage: The advanced storage options provided by the DR365V appliance, including NVMe, SSD, and SAS drives, further contributed to improved backup speeds. The utilization of NVMe drives for operating systems and hypervisors ensured optimal performance, while SSD and SAS drives delivered enhanced data transfer rates.

The DR365V backup and disaster recovery appliance not only accelerated backup speeds but also ensuring the highest level of data security and ransomware protection through its air-gapped and immutable backup features. By maintaining an air-gapped environment and immutability, the municipality’s backup data remained isolated and protected from cyber threats and unauthorized modifications.

The implementation of the DR365V backup and disaster recovery appliance allowed the municipality to streamline its backup operations, achieve faster backups, and enhance overall data protection efficiency.

The Results

Reduced Backup Window: The implementation of our DR365V backup and disaster recovery appliance resulted in a remarkable 35% reduction in the municipality’s backup window. By leveraging advanced storage technologies and parallel processing capabilities, backups were completed in significantly less time, minimizing the impact on critical operations and improving overall operational efficiency.

Automated Air-Gapping: The implementation of the DR365V backup and disaster recovery appliance revolutionized the municipality’s backup environment by introducing automated air-gapping. In the past, manual intervention was required to isolate backup data and protect it from cyber threats and ransomware attacks. This process involved physically disconnecting and managing tapes, which was time-consuming and prone to human error.

With DR365V, the municipality embraced automated air-gapping through policy-based controls and immutability settings. Our solution enabled the automatic isolation of backup data, ensuring that it remained securely offline and protected from unauthorized access. By eliminating the need for manual intervention, the municipality achieved a maintenance-free operation with enhanced ransomware protection.

Automated air-gapping not only improved the reliability and integrity of the backup environment but also reduced the risk of data breaches and ransomware incidents. IT staff could confidently focus on other critical tasks, knowing that the backup data was isolated and safeguarded without the need for constant manual oversight.

Streamlined Backup Management: Our solution not only improved backup speeds but also streamlined backup management processes. The municipality experienced a substantial reduction in the time dedicated to backup activities, decreasing from 70% of the daily workload to just 20%. With faster backup processes and simplified management interfaces, IT staff could allocate more time and resources to other essential tasks, enhancing productivity and operational agility.

Enhanced Scalability: As the municipality’s data volume continued to grow at an average rate of 25% per year, our solution proved highly scalable, accommodating the increasing storage demands seamlessly. The DR365V allows the municipality to scale up by adding storage expansion units (EBODs) and scale out to virtually unlimited appliance nodes. Each 4U appliance node can be populated for 1.5PBs of raw storage capacity.  

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