Replication and instant VM restore help SCC's clients meet RPOs and RTOs

Background

SCC UK aligns its clients’ IT infrastructures with their business objectives by improving processes, systems and procedures. Before recommending technology solutions, SCC determines whether the solutions will deliver significant benefits to clients by testing them internally. That is how SCC became a reseller of Veeam® Backup & Replication™.

The IT team at SCC had become frustrated with its slow, unreliable backup tool, so Veeam was deployed to backup hundreds of virtual machines (VMs).

“We had immediate success with Veeam,” said Jonathan Walmsley, Design and Implementation Specialist at SCC UK. “Veeam is so powerful and effective that we decided to adopt it internally to ensure 100% backup success. Its major benefits include simplicity, speed and reliability, which are the same attributes our clients look for in a VM protection solution. Not only can we recommend Veeam with full confidence to our clients, we can also offer them something we couldn’t offer in the past: cross-site replication and instant point-in-time VM recovery.”

Veeam Software: Support from Start to Finish

Veeam unites VM backup and replication in a single solution, increases the value of backup and reinvents data protection for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

SCC backs up more than 300 VMs and replicates critical VMs for disaster recovery (DR). With Veeam’s near-continuous data protection (near-CDP), an IT professional can immediately fail over to a standby VM if a production VM fails.

“We couldn’t offer replication before Veeam,” Walmsley said. “That capability and instant VM restore help our clients meet RPOs and RTOs.”

Walmsley said backup and recovery with Veeam have proven invaluable to his company, both as a customer and reseller.

“We’re like many of our clients who implemented Veeam because their previous backup solutions became inefficient in expanding virtual environments,” he explained. “Veeam’s ability to run multiple VMs and backups in parallel is a great advantage. The fact that Veeam is agentless is a big benefit to our clients as well. They are very relieved they don’t have to purchase, install and manage agents on VMs. Veeam is about less management. There’s almost a ‘set-and-forget-about-it mentality’ with Veeam.”

According to Walmsley, Veeam’s pricing is beneficial to resellers.

“The pricing is simple, making it easy to sell to clients,” he said. “Easy is the operative word with Veeam, which is appealing to resellers and clients. In addition to being easy to sell, Veeam is easy to use and it provides an easy way to save money through lower licensing costs and reduced backup storage space. Veeam has built-in deduplication and compression, which saves on backup storage space. Our backup storage decreased from 50 terabytes to six.”

Veeam is fast too. Walmsley noted that SCC clients report backup speed has increased at least 10 times compared to their previous solutions, enabling them to backup more frequently—sometimes hourly rather than daily. Full VM restore is faster with Veeam too.

“With Instant VM Recovery, our clients can restore a corrupt VM in less than five minutes, which is a huge timesaver considering it could take up to five hours in the past,” he said.

Another reason SCC decided Veeam Backup & Replication is the best solution for its clients is because Veeam supports both vSphere and Hyper-V, including Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.

“Being able to backup both vSphere and Hyper-V provides a single pane of glass for virtual backups, which in turn reduces management time for our clients. Again, the operative word with Veeam is ‘easy.’”