Evalueserve Reduces Recovery Time by 99% and Resolves Issues Proactively in Virtualised Environment with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Evalueserve uses proprietary tools, techniques and domain expertise to solve complex business challenges for clients at Fortune 500 companies, professional services firms and mid-size companies in various industries. Evalueserve provides financial services, corporate and professional services and business solutions for life sciences and healthcare, analytics, intellectual property (IP) and research and development. Each business unit has service level agreements (SLAs) with many of its clients, and Evalueserve’s IT department plays an important role in meeting each SLA.

“We’ve always met clients’ SLAs, but we knew there had to be a faster and easier way to recover virtualised data and applications,” said Anuj Joshi, Associate Vice President of Information Technology at Evalueserve. “We’re in the business of finding new ways to reach new levels of efficiency and effectiveness, so we set out to find the best availability solution on the market.”

Evalueserve’s traditional backup tool required agents in each virtual machine (VM), which slowed down backup and replication to the point that all VMs could not be backed up and replicated daily, only the most critical VMs. Agents also slowed down recovery. System administrators spent up to eight hours rebuilding, reloading, reconfiguring and restoring a VM.

“There was one more challenge with the traditional backup tool,” Joshi said. “It didn’t provide in-depth monitoring and reporting of the hypervisor, so we didn’t have deep visibility into our VMware vSphere environment. Without deep visibility, we couldn’t see relationships among our resources so we didn’t have all the information we needed to diagnose problems.”

Joshi and his colleagues attended a VMware seminar and watched a demonstration of Veeam Availability Suite. Before the demonstration began, they were told Veeam provided full visibility into virtualised environments and restored VMs in minutes.

“We didn’t think restoration speed like that was possible, but after seeing it ourselves we decided to test Veeam at our office in India,” Joshi explained. “If we gained full visibility and recovered critical applications fast, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory and SharePoint, we’d meet clients’ SLAs with tremendous efficiency, giving us more time to work on data centre initiatives that improve business process efficiency.”

The Veeam Solution

Veeam Availability Suite proved its value at Evalueserve when the IT team restored a test VM in minutes from a regular backup, reducing recovery time by 99%. Veeam also provides full visibility into the virtualised environment, enabling fast identification and resolution of issues before they impact business. Evalueserve’s goal is to deploy Veeam Availability Suite in offices worldwide for onsite backup of approximately 5TB of data on 250 VMs and offsite replication for disaster recovery (DR).

“There’s no availability solution like Veeam,” Joshi said. “Veeam gives us an extremely high level of confidence in our IT infrastructure. In case of disaster, we have full confidence we can restore quickly.”

Sachin Jain, Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, concurred. He made the final decision to purchase and deploy Veeam Availability Suite.

“We only implement solutions that provide tangible business benefits, and Veeam gives us backup and recovery insurance for business continuity,” Jain said. “Veeam delivers the capabilities that ensure mission-critical data availability in case of disaster, so when clients require extremely fast recovery, we can make that promise with complete confidence.”

Veeam provides more than fast recovery for Evalueserve.

“Veeam saves us a significant amount of time, making us more efficient,” he explained. “Instead of our system administrators spending four to six hours restoring VMs and several hours each week worrying about backups completing successfully, they use that time to focus on IT initiatives that will improve business processes. Veeam provides the two things that every CIO looks for in a product: improved performance to benefit clients and greater efficiency within the business.”

In addition to 99% faster recovery with Veeam, backup is 50% faster, allowing Evalueserve to back up all VMs each day, not only critical VMs like the traditional backup tool. Evalueserve take the backup process one step further by testing the recoverability of each backup with SureBackup. Veeam starts a VM in an isolated environment called a Virtual Lab where it runs a series of tests to guarantee each restore point in the backup is viable. Evalueserve uses Veeam’s Virtual Lab for an additional purpose: to test software patches before putting them into production.

Equally as important, Veeam Availability Suite provides visibility into Evalueserve’s VMware vSphere environment through monitoring, reporting and capacity planning. Veeam’s 24x7 real-time monitoring and alerting help Evalueserve identify and resolve issues before they impact the business. Veeam’s reporting helps Evalueserve assess performance and utilisation of the backup infrastructure and track the status of backup and verification jobs. Capacity planning takes the guesswork out of resource optimisation.

“Veeam provides so much in one solution,” Jain said. “It’s highly reliable, easy to use and delivers 24.7.365 availability. “When you compare Veeam to other solutions, Veeam clearly outscores them all.”

The Results

• Recovery is 99% faster
  High-speed recovery in Veeam Availability Suite lets Evalueserve recover whole VMs, files and application items in minutes, unlike the traditional backup tool that took hours. During testing, Evalueserve used Instant VM Recovery to quickly restart a VM running Microsoft SharePoint (300 GB) from a regular backup.
• Backup is 50% faster and tested for recoverability
  A backup is only useful if it is recoverable. Evalueserve uses Veeam’s SureBackup to verify every created restore point of every VM to ensure they will function as expected in case a disaster strikes.
• Full visibility enables proactive issue resolution for business continuity
  With Veeam Availability Suite, Evalueserve monitors the health and performance of its virtualised environment to optimise resources. Full visibility lets Evalueserve identify and resolve issues before they become problems and impact the business.