Mondragon Unibertsitatea has 99% reliability of its data security and availability with Veeam

The business challenges

The information systems department at the Higher Polytechnic Engineering School at Mondragon manages part of the technology infrastructure for Mondragon Unibertsitatea. It also manages its own data processing center (DPC), which hosts common servers. The information systems department’s priority is to keep the business on track and provide the optimal responsiveness and services to their users and customers. To achieve this, IT backs up all the servers, virtual desktops, websites and the institution’s information system.

The Engineering Faculty of Mondragon Unibertsitatea previously used a NetApp backup system, for backups related to its virtualization platform with VMware, and an additional solution from Symantec, to back up its Oracle databases. According to Arantxa Manterola, the school’s Information Systems Coordinator, this duo they no longer satisfied their needs for agility and reliability: the recovery windows in the scheme in which they operated (semi-annual copies to tape) were already very large, and this was becoming a critical problem, since the copy had not been completed when the next one had to start.

For the Mondragon Unibertsitatea faculty, this was not an efficient service.

“If someone needed a file, we had to recover a lot of information to be able to find it and deliver it to them, and this could take a lot of time,” said Arantxa Manterola, Information Systems Coordinator.

The Veeam solution

According to Jon Ezpeleta, regional director of the North Zone at Econocom, the Veeam partner that supported Mondragon Unibertsitatea in this implementation, “Veeam was the solution that best integrated with the university’s technological environment, as we could reuse the existing infrastructure 100% without the need to make any investment in new hardware”.

“We used to create tape backups weekly due to a disk storage space issue, but by using Veeam, we have been able to reorganize our processes. Now, everything is done on disk, and this means a great benefit in terms of cost and time savings,” considers Manterola.

Thanks to Veeam, the Polytechnic School was able to overcome historical challenges of its old system and reduce its backup storage. Veeam has been able to run Mondragon Unibertsitatea from a “rudimentary” backup system and come to have a single solution that simplified all backup by presenting everything in a single panel.

Without a doubt, the great benefit that Veeam has brought them is its high level of security.

Among the obtained results, Ezpeleta (from Econocom) highlights 2 priority aspects: on the one hand, a considerably simplified management (since the entire backup and restorations process is orchestrated from the Veeam console), which results in the productivity of the IT staff, and on the other hand, reduced backup windows and immediate recoveries, which give Mondragon Unibertsitatea an unthinkable agility compared to the previous solution.

Veeam’s granularity feature has been extremely useful, as it has accelerated the systems department’s response to users, and IT no longer has to recover something like a complete virtual machine (VM) to reach data that someone requested.

“With Veeam, we are not only sure that we are backing up everything we need, but also that, in case of any loss, we will have a fast recovery, whether at the database, virtual machine or data level,” comments Manterola.

Veeam is also an important part of the university’s desktop and applications virtualization strategy, which has been accelerated by COVID-19. The school needed to make it possible for all students to take classes online and run the required software for their classes at home.

“We have launched the pilot and some students are already working in this format,” said Manterola. “We still need to continue improving in the hybrid setting, but all students have already experienced virtual interaction and all new students will enter school 100% virtually.”

For this, Manterola relies on Veeam’s scalability and doesn’t expect any issue if they need to increase the amount of data or increase the amount of VMs. For students and business clients, having Veeam solutions at hand means greater security for the data they use daily.

“Moreover, when requesting support for a data loss, our users have noticed very short response times,” said Manterola. “This results in greater productivity and flexibility.”

The results

• Integration with other platforms and ease-of-use
  For Mondragon Unibertsitatea, the integration of Veeam’s platforms with its VMware and Oracle platforms was crucial. This allowed them to remove two backup infrastructures from their plan. Additionally, having everything in a single panel simplifies the work of the IT staff in charge of backups.
• 99% reliability in terms of data security and availability
  With Veeam, information systems at Mondragon Unibertsitatea increased its reliability to 99%. This meant that business areas at the university can perform their work and save a significant amount of time when performing backups.
• More agile recovery, which means more productivity for business areas
  “With our previous tool, recovering information could take a whole day. Nowadays, thanks to Veeam’s granularity, we can recover within an hour. The fact that an employee is able to have information so fast makes a great difference in their productivity and level of response,” said Manterola.