StoneFly Helps School Achieve 24.7.365 Data Availability

The Challenge

Until recently, a leading school in the city of New York and one of the oldest independent in the U.S. had operated in a legacy environment doing manual backups by USB and never invested in offsite backup or disaster recovery solutions. The process was very me-consuming for the school’s small IT team, with very high-risk of human error.

“The manual process caused a lot of worry to the team, and sometimes people would not have the time to do backups, or it would be forgotten. It could be a bit catastrophic,” said the IT Manager at the New York City School. “The unreliability of the network we had is the kind of things that keep IT awake at night.”

The New York City School started shifting into a hyperconverged production environment that is fully virtualized. Doing so they required a reliable, cost-effective and simple data availability solution that would support the school’s IT infrastructure consolidation and upscaling. The school needed a solution that would provide offsite backup and recovery.

Unreliable backup and recovery could interrupt the workflow for days, and affect not only the productivity of staff, but also the quality of education and support the school is providing for its students and their families.

“The role of IT has evolved in education systems, and the landscape at the school has changed over the last ten years, from then computer labs to hand held devices used by students and so on,” says the IT manager. It is vital that the core infrastructure and systems keep on running to deliver quality learning.”

Furthermore, the threat of losing access to students’ educational records due to downtime, or leaving them exposed to malicious attacks, could not only mean loss of sensitive data but would also result in noncompliance with privacy legislation.

To mitigate these risks, the School sought a backup and recovery solution that would integrate seamlessly with its existing systems and that would support its unique requirements, and ensure positive results.

The StoneFly Solution

An existing customer recommended the StoneFly offered Veeam backup and replication solution to the New York City School. “We needed a solution that would improve our backup and restore processes, as well as provide ongoing technical support and excellent implementation guidance, a colleague of mine recommended Veeam in conjunction with the StoneFly Cloud Storage in Microsoft Azure” says the IT Manager.

“We still carried out our own market review via IT specialists in other Schools, and those who used the StoneFly Veeam Cloud Connect to Azure all gave positive reviews and we were pleased to go ahead”.

Today, the StoneFly Veeam Backup and Replication solution allows the School to backup to its onsite servers, backup its virtual machines offsite to Microsoft Azure Cloud using the StoneFly cloud repository in Azure as a target for data recovery. The new backup solution reduced the amount of hours significantly which were previously dedicated to manual backups, as well as the risk of human-error. Backup and replication jobs are now run automatically over a specified schedule on and offsite to ensure all data is secure, compliant and up-to-date.

“StoneFly Veeam backup and replication has filled gaps we did not even know needed filling, and the automation has saved us a lot of time that we now spend on managing our IT infrastructure and attend to other areas that need attending to.” Said the IT Manager at the school. “The biggest gain is the time of restoration. Previously, when a server goes down we need 1-3 days to rebuild the server and configuration. Now, server restore happens in the same day, and for critical systems, immediate failover is available. Our student, financial and business records and systems are always-available.”

The centralization of backup has helped the school in monitoring and managing their two disparate systems. “with Veeam we can receive regular reports of all our backup processes which help us identify any points of pain before impacting the school. Previously, we would have to go through loads of information before determining what the issue is. Veeam’s advanced monitoring and reporting allow us to immediately know what the issue is.” Said the IT Manager.

The StoneFly offered Veeam backup and replication solution has been a major relief for the New York City School, its IT team, and its management who did not only see major improvements in terms of productivity, but also peace of mind, knowing their sensitive and important data is reliable and secure.

The Results

• Regained hundreds of hours of IT productivity
The automation of backups over a specified schedule removed the need for time consuming and unreliable manual-backups, while advanced monitoring and reporting allows the IT team to immediately identify and address issues before they impact the school. Recovery time has been cut down from 3 days to same-day recovery for noncritical virtual machines and immediate failover is available for mission-critical systems.

• Seamless integration with existing infrastructure
StoneFly Veeam backup and replication solution integrated seamlessly with the school’s onsite infrastructure and supported the school’s goals of scaling up its IT infrastructure. The new backup and recovery solution not only improved on the old manual backup processes, but also delivered offsite backup to Microsoft Azure for the school.
• Ensured Compliance with privacy regulations
“Our management are liable for the safety of our records, and could even face legal consequences if sensitive data is compromised. Having StoneFly is very reassuring for them knowing that the school’s data and records are protected.”