StoneFly Backup & Disaster Recovery Solutions Protect
District Council Infrastructure
The district council has 16 sites with a total of 550 employees that handle the data generated
by a total population of 75000. The Council infrastructure facilitates key
government services along with strategic managementand
maintenance of its municipality and community.
Challenges:
The previous storage and backup solution could no longer scale to meet growth capacities. In addition to being past its support lifecycle, it also required significant manual intervention to maintain the Council’s day-to-day operations.
This resulted in higher OpEx costs and distraction from the core operations of the council. Multiple solutions and products were needed to cope with various processes like image creation, and the eventual shipping of offsite backup tapes. A formal archival component for data, email and retired system was also lacking. While dedicated backup solutions and strategies were adopted to backup SQL databases.
Solution:
The combination of StoneFly DR365V™ backup and disaster recovery solution with Veeam.
Results:
- A backup and disaster recovery infrastructure
that provides limitless and effortless scalability. - Greater reliability, enhanced performance and approximately 90% reduction in time.
High availability of important data. - Cloud connect to Microsoft Azure cloud for
data redundancy, off-site backup and archiving
The Challenges of the District Council
Like many government organizations, this district council too relied on its IT infrastructure to perform daily operations. Similar to the other government organizations, it faced the challenge of a legacy system that was unable to meet growth capacities. The data protection architecture of the infrastructure was only an afterthought. A number of solutions and software were used to backup and restore important council and resident information.
“It took a lot of our time to maintain the systems, do routine checkups and fix backups” says an Infrastructure Support Officer.
The district council has to maintain and process the data of over 75000 citizens and over 550 staff members. Most of the data they retain at the Council infrastructure is resident’s information such as house plans, dog registrations etc.
The main concern of the council was the reliability of the backup solution and its ability to scale and accommodate the continuously increasing workload. According to their forecast, they expected an increase in disk usage space by 15% every year. Their analysis also suggested that due to the increase in high quality media content generation, the disk usage was likely to be even greater than the estimated 15%.
Taking advantage of a reorganisation within the Council, the IT team raised the issue of implementing a unified solution. After a competitive round of quotation from a number of vendors, they chose the powerful combination of Veeam and StoneFly
The StoneFly Solution
With our DR365V™ solution, the Infrastructure staff has a lot less to worry about. Routine checks don’t consume as much time and backups are reliable and faster.
The technology reduced the time of backup for approximately 30 TBs of data from sixteen hours to two hours. (88% reduction in time)
The number of tools required to manage backup also reduced from numerous to just one; reducing complexity, risk and staff training requirements.
“We still do our routine checkups because it’s standard procedure but with this solution, it’s faster and it’s simpler” said an IT staff member at the Council.
The legacy technology slowed down overall procedures and because of the backup sometimes bled to the next day. However, with our technology the backup process is finished in under 2.5 hours. If run at once, they’re done in just over an hour.
The Result
Greater Reliability and Increased Up-time
The district council is providing more and more online services to its residents. It is important that its systems are always up and running. With our complete backup and disaster recovery solution, their services are operational 24/7. Unlike the legacy systems which resulted in disrupted and lost revenue and angry residents, our solution ensures continuity and delivers RTOs and RPOs of less than 15 minutes.
Even in the event of a disaster, the Council Infrastructure can be back up and running within minutes.
Scalability and Future-proof Infrastructure
DR365V™ scale-out configuration is capable of supporting PBs of data per node and it can be scaled-out to as much as needed. The Council’s concern about the future growth in data is no longer an issue. If the data grows faster than predicted, then they can simply add in more nodes and not only scale-out the storage capacity but also the performance; thereby reducing the time taken for backup and restore even further.
Backup and Archiving in Microsoft Azure Cloud
Backup of older data and archiving of data is no longer an issue and doesn’t require additional tools or resources. The Council now easily leverages the cloud connect services of DR365V™ and sets up their backups in Microsoft Azure cloud. They leverage the Cool blob storage for backups of older data while moving their archival data to the Archive blob storage. In order to automate the process, they use scripts that move data from one storage tier to the other after pre-defined time has passed.
For compliance reasons, they’ve also integrated Microsoft Azure Government cloud into the mix. Therefore, complying to industry regulations isn’t a problem.
