BAAR, Switzerland: May 2, 2017
Veeam Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise, today announced that R’Club, a leading not-for-profit child care provider in the Tampa Bay, Florida area, is using Veeam Cloud Connect with iland, a platinum Veeam cloud service provider, for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS).
Serving more than 4,000 infants, preschool, elementary and middle school children in 47 locations, R’Club provides high-quality, accessible and affordable learning and development programs that strengthen children, families and their communities. R’Club was established in 1976, employs 400 people and prides itself on providing reliable child care for the community, which can be a challenge given the rough weather in the Sunshine State.
Florida has experienced more hurricanes than any other state in the United States, and, since 1851, there have been just 18 seasons in which a hurricane did not make landfall in the Sunshine State1. Indeed, two of the three North Atlantic hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. as a category 5 during the 20th century hit Florida (the 1935 Labor Day hurricane and Hurricane Andrew in 1992)[1].
When first responders have to take action during hurricane season, someone has to take care of their children. And in Tampa Bay, many of their children go to R’Club Child Care, Inc.
“We can’t operate our child care centers without fully responding IT,” said Michael Brunner, IT Coordinator for R’Club. “When we’re called on to step up during a natural disaster, our IT systems can’t fail. If they do fail, we can’t stay operational, and we fail to serve our first responders, their children and our community.”
To keep IT systems running 24.7.365 — even during a hurricane — R’Club deployed Veeam Availability Suite on site for fast backup and recovery. But for disaster recovery, R’Club’s network-attached storage (NAS) device transferred backup copies off site to a service provider. If R’Club’s data center was swept away by a hurricane, the service provider could restore data through Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS).
In practice, however, transferring backup copies from the NAS to the service provider was error-prone, making recovery unreliable. It might take hours or days to restore critical IT systems, and R’Club couldn’t take that risk. R’Club had made a commitment to take care of first responders’ children so they can take care of the community.
“One of our most critical systems is email,” Brunner said. “If email fails and we can’t recover it quickly from a backup, staying in touch with staff and partner agencies becomes a major issue. Email must be always available, especially during a hurricane.”
The Veeam Cloud Connect Solution
Veeam Cloud Connect enables Veeam customers to point their backups or replicas to a service provider’s cloud. In this case, R’Club chose to take advantage of Veeam Cloud Connect to partner with iland. Using the Veeam console, R’Club replicates virtual machines (VMs) supporting critical IT systems to iland’s secure cloud. If a hurricane destroys R’Club’s data center, iland will trigger a failover so R’Club can access critical IT systems in minutes, not hours or days as with its previous system.
“Veeam and iland provide us with our first all-inclusive DR strategy,” Brunner said. “Plus, periodic DR tests give us confidence we can recover quickly in a real disaster. We’ve never had this level of business continuity before.”
Benefits of the solution include:
“As a non-profit organization, we don’t have funds to spare,” Brunner said. “We prefer to invest our resources in our programs and in our community. Veeam and iland help us do that by giving us a more cost-effective DR plan and a new level of business continuity.”
“Veeam Cloud Connect and iland provide organizations of all sizes with a reliable and fast DRaaS solution, enabling customers to set up offsite DR without breaking the bank,” said Peter McKay, President and COO of Veeam. “Cloud has been the fastest growing segment of our business for the last several years, and it’s no surprise as to why: we’re solving the problem of setting up offsite DR by partnering with trusted advisors that our customers already know well. Thanks to Veeam and iland, R’Club can face hurricane season without any worry about keeping its IT systems available 24.7.365.”
About Veeam Software
Veeam recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Enterprise, a business that must operate 24.7.365. To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility. Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting the current and future business goals of Veeam customers.
Founded in 2006, Veeam currently has 47,000 ProPartners and more than 242,000 customers worldwide. Veeam's global headquarters are located in Baar, Switzerland, and the company has offices throughout the world. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com.
[1] Wikipedia. “1935 Labor Day hurricane.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane. Retrieved March 23, 2017