Manchester Central boosts business continuity with Veeam and the Pure Technology Group

The Business Challenge

Manchester Central is in the heart of one of Europe’s most vibrant cities. With the capacity to accommodate intimate corporate functions, large-scale conferences and huge international exhibitions, Manchester Central provides the perfect location for some of the world’s leading events, including the Children’s Global Media Summit and IP Expo.

Delivering exceptional experiences is what Manchester Central does best, and robust IT systems and processes play a key role. “We’re always looking for ways to enhance IT system availability, so we contacted the Pure Technology Group (TPTG),” said Steven Bennett, Head of IT at Manchester Central. “They’ve been our technology partner for many years, and we knew they’d have a solution.”

Bennett said the IT team wanted to take advantage of the latest technology to increase recovery speed in a disaster scenario. Restoring its event management system (Ungerboeck) off-premises could take up to 24 hours, which had the potential to create a disconnect among teams, data and processes.

“We pride ourselves on being a world-class venue from the first time you contact us about hosting your event to the moment you’re greeted on site by our concierge team,” he said. “The services we provide set us apart from other venues, but we need unlimited access to Ungerboeck so can deliver those services efficiently.”

Andy Pilkington, CTO at TPTG, said replication was the answer for unlimited access to Ungerboeck. “We’ve provided Backup as a Service (BaaS) to Manchester Central for many years, and now it was time to add replication for DRaaS.”

The Veeam Solution

Veeam and TPTG deliver DRaaS to enhance Manchester Central’s BC plan. “In the event of a disaster, we know we’ll have access to our event management system in minutes so the business can carry on normally,” Bennett said. “Veeam and TPTG give us tremendous peace of mind.”

Manchester Central uses Veeam Availability Suite to back up 15 TB across 30 virtual machines on premises for fast recovery and to TPTG, so an offsite copy is available for BaaS. TPTG also replicates mission-critical workloads to dedicated cloud hosts for DRaaS.

Pilkington said Veeam Availability Suite has been powering TPTG’s BaaS and DRaaS for more than a decade. “Veeam helps us provide the best services possible to our mutual customers. For example, we can replicate directly into vCloud Director to take advantage of the enhancements VMware built into the platform, enabling us to scale our infrastructure so we can accommodate every customer’s needs.”

Manchester Central and TPTG also use Veeam Service Provider Console, a webbased management and monitoring platform offering several capabilities. For TPTG, that includes deploying BaaS and DRaaS for customers. For Manchester Central, that includes managing backup and automating DR testing from a single user interface. The process is so incredibly fast and easy that I no longer have to focus my time and priorities on DR testing. Instead I can focus on improving IT services for our visitors, from Wi-Fi to our web site portal.”

Veeam also helps Manchester Central comply with GDPR. Built-in, end-to-end 256-bit encryption scrambles data into an unreadable format that can only be unlocked by Manchester Central. “Veeam encrypts data during backup, replication and at rest,” Bennett said. “This is another way Veeam gives us peace of mind.”

The Results

• Delivers DRaaS to ensure business continuity
  “Our business demands fast recovery, and it only takes minutes with Veeam and TPTG,” Bennett said. “Business continuity is critical and having confidence in our IT systems is key.”
• Automates and simplifies DR testing with 1-click failover
  “DR testing with Veeam Service Provider Console is fast and easy,” Bennett said. “It literally takes one click and just a few minutes to fail over and become fully operational again.”
• Supports compliance with the GDPR
  Data security is an important part of Manchester Central’s BC plan. End-to-end encryption from Veeam helps keep data secure and compliant.