Challenges:
Solution:
- StoneFly DR365V with Veeam Backup Engine
- StoneFly DR365V provided a simple, reliable and cost-efficient solution. As a charitable organization, these were the most important factors for WWF-Canada.
Results:
- Availability of relatively cost-effective expertise and support in the market.
- Reduced the risk of data loss with reliable, rapid backup; restoration in under 15 minutes for the file server data.
- Upfront investment savings of $12,200 plus $5,000 annual savings.
The Challenge
World Wildlife Fund Canada (“WWF-Canada”) is a nonprofit organization on a mission to end the decline of endangered species and their home grounds and to support their safe recovery. The organization addresses the threats that affect animals and plants by using the best available science while working in partnership with Indigenous groups, communities, businesses and government.
Partner and community donations are vital to such organizations’ continued growth, as well as internal information and communication technologies run by WWF‘s IT department. This is particularly challenging to deliver considering the fact that WWF’s staff are so widespread in different state offices and numerous home/regional offices around Canada. Protection of these critical IT systems and peace of mind knowing that the systems are backed up and available is vital. With people volunteering their time, the organization wants to ensure their systems are running efficiently and productively. Downtime is intolerable, and any time of downtime would cause potential loss of reputation among the organization’s volunteer community. In addition, the organization has remote work sites that do not have physical access to IT resources.
WWF-Canada needed a solution that ensured availability of its IT systems. Furthermore, IT infrastructure needed to be cost efficient from both support and backup standpoints. When looking to upgrade its existing backup and disaster recovery solution, WWF-Canada was confronted with excessive costs from its legacy solution provider, with little-to-no support included. With a few number of staff in their IT department, support was a crucial component of the backup and disaster recovery solution upgrade.
The IT team works to provide seamless availability of the IT infrastructure for all workers and ensures nightly-backups on-premise and offsite for the organization’s virtualized software environment.
WWF-Canada employees rely heavily on the internal server as well as Office365 to access files and email and do their jobs productively. “When the time came to upgrade from the old hardware system, I was not confident we could successfully shift from the old hardware to the new hardware. We needed a solution that would enable us to shift from the old hardware to new hardware seamlessly, without fear of data loss, while also remaining cost-efficient”, said the IT manager.
The StoneFly Solution
In searching for a solution, WWF-Canada’s local IT consultant had no hesitation in recommending StoneFly DR365V to help them replace their old hardware and migrate all virtual machines and get the organization up-to-date with a newer backup and recovery solution.
The IT manager recalls how StoneFly DR365V increased productivity within the organization, enabling them to transact more efficiently, reliably and effectively, keeping their volunteer’s community happy. “Remote desktop servers, file servers, mail gateway, application servers, and support systems are being backed up with the StoneFly DR365V. Our staff do not have to worry about IT anymore. If a file is lost, they can be confident that it can be recovered in a matter of minutes.”
The IT consultant has worked closely with the team of WWF-Canada to drive its evolution in IT infrastructure. “WWF-Canada has an important job in preserving Canada’s biodiversity and natural habitats and like all businesses today, IT infrastructure is the core at which their operations exist. We wanted to provide them with the right platform to ensure their staff can do their job effectively and easily, while at the same time providing the most cost effective solution to address their needs.”
“We proposed DR365V due to its simplicity, reliability and financial viability. Cost efficiency was one of the most important factors as WWF-Canada is a charitable organization.
The StoneFly DR365V has Veeam as the backup engine which is considered a leader in the market, with a range of data availability options that suit any business needs and has until today showed success for WWF-Canada by freeing up IT resources and cutting costs.”
The Results
Availability of relatively cost effective expertise and support in the market
“WWF-Canada’s IT team is small, so we needed an intuitive, lightweight solution with ample support if and when needed. Through our IT partner consultancy and my personal research, it was evident that DR365V with the Veeam backup engine is the market leader in delivering first class availability,” said the IT Manager.
“There is a lot of people you can rely on nationally and globally to help you go through the software, which is all-inclusive of the overall cost.”
Reduced the risk of data loss with reliable, rapid backup; restoration in under 15 minutes for the file server data
The primary use of the DR365V is for nightly-backups in our virtualized environment. We can backup twice the amount of data in the same period of time, which does not impact our other operations,” affirms the IT Manager. With the help of the support team, the Database, Fundraising and the field teams based in remote locations, can now be assured of availability of their systems and data, and that there will be no disruptions.
Upfront investment saves of $12,200, and $5,000 annual saves
By switching to DR365V from the legacy solution vendor, WWF-Canada made cost savings of $12,200 in the first year of implementation, and an annual cost saving of $5,000 from the second year forward.
