Mays Business School cuts its data restore process from weeks to minutes with Veeam

In the competitive field of higher education in the U.S., Mays Business School has built a reputation for excellence. The organization is consistently top-rated for both academia and research.

“At Mays, our goal is to create the best possible environment for our users to thrive,” said Ryan C. Perry, Director, Technology Services, Mays Business School. “To retain our spot as a highly ranked business school nationwide, making the right technology decisions is crucial.”

At Mays Business School, data plays an essential role in back-office administration, teaching and research, so protecting this vital resource is a key goal. To achieve this with a small IT team, the school always looks for ways to maximize efficiency.

“Research data isn’t just important for making initial breakthroughs — it’s also vital for reproducing the results later,” said Greg M. Spiller, Lead Infrastructure Manager, Technology Services, Mays Business School. “Our staff rely on the up-to-date information in our Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM), and many part-time students can only log in at certain times of the day. As a result, we can’t afford system availability issues or data loss, so choosing the right data protection solution a must.”

Mays Business School relies on Veeam Availability Suite to ensure that its students, faculty and staff can always access the data they need. Plus, with Veeam Universal License (VUL), the organization gains the benefit of simple and future-proof licensing.

“Veeam being at Mays Business School predates my own time at the organization, so we’ve been using the solution successfully for a long time,” said Perry. “If Veeam hadn’t been in use when I got here, I would’ve brought it in; in my experience, there is no better backup and replication technology.”

Today, Mays Business School uses Veeam to back up 100 virtual machines (VMs) across 10 physical servers incrementally each day. The organization stores backups at its three data center sites, with two located on the main campus, and one in Houston.

“The beauty of Veeam is that it was built to back up virtualized environments,” said Perry. “This agentless backup feature is a total game-changer since it means we don’t have to update the agents on each of our 100 VMs. Veeam was one of the first data protection companies to bring in that feature, and in our view, they still do it best. We now keep replica snapshots of our environment at our main campus for fast recovery in the event of a disaster.”

Using Veeam, Mays Business School can adapt its data backup and retention policies to suit changing business needs. For example, the school recently doubled how long it retains file server and Laserfiche data.

“Veeam offers us a single point of control that drives down the time we spend worrying about backups to almost zero,” said Spiller. “We often get requests from researchers to restore file server data they have accidentally deleted, and now we’re covered by an extra insurance policy for important work. Plus, our Laserfiche data, which includes essential items such as employee contracts and business workflow documentation, is saved for even longer, helping our human resources and finance teams keep the school running effectively.”

With a hardware-agnostic data protection solution that enables comprehensive backups for all workloads, Mays Business School is in a strong position to keep important information protected, whatever the future may bring.

“It’s great that we don’t have to factor Veeam into our hardware decisions, since we know it works with anything,” said Spiller. “We don’t know what the future holds, but we’re confident that Veeam can pivot to whichever strategic direction we go in. With Veeam, you just set it up and it runs, which allows us to focus on furthering the mission of Mays Business School.”

Restores data and IT systems in minutes, boosting continuity of service while reducing costs.
“With Veeam, we can recover data quickly and cost-effectively,” said Perry. “As a result, we’re better prepared for incidents such as cyber-attacks or hardware failures.”

Protects intellectual property, helping to advance knowledge and preserve faculty and student work.
By guarding against data loss with Veeam, Mays Business School prevents interruptions to research, learning and back-office university administration.

Saves an estimated 16 resource hours per full back-up and eliminates the need for downtime, enhancing efficiency and boosting availability.
“If we had to update an agent on every VM, that would take at least two days’ work and would involve us scheduling downtime for critical servers,” said Spiller. “Agentless technology from Veeam allows us to avoid disruption to our services and save the IT team valuable time.”