Having successfully moved to an almost 100 per cent virtual infrastructure, Together Housing Group has just completed the implementation of a virtual backup and replication system from Veeam.
Backup times have now been halved, recovery times cut by 80 per cent and overall the new system is saving THG more than £70,000 per year in combined technology and consultancy costs.
Lee Richardson, systems engineer, Together Housing Group, said, “A disruption to any part of the business, from IT services to our field workers, can have huge effects on our tenants. As we pushed towards a 100 per cent virtual IT infrastructure, with its accompanying cost and flexibility benefits, we needed to be certain that the applications and data on that infrastructure would be easily recoverable in the event of a disaster.”
THG has around 1,500 end-users across 20 locations in the North of England. Its 300 servers are currently split between 80 per cent virtual and 20 per cent physical.
THG originally used legacy backup and recovery tools but they lacked the capability, flexibility and simplicity that THG needed. The tools were too difficult to use and required numerous and lengthy visits from the vendors’ technical teams to set up and fix incidents. It also employed an external consultancy to help with backup and recovery, providing services such as replication which were difficult for THG to provide itself using its existing tools.
THG decided to replace these with Veeam Backup, a product specifically designed to work in a virtual environment.
Richardson said, “Veeam Backup has proved a success in every department. By providing everything we need in one easy-to-use package, we have saved at least £20,000 per year on our legacy backup tools as well as £50,000 per year on our backup and recovery provider since we can now deliver all these functions in-house.
“At the same time, backup windows have been halved, from 16 hours to seven, including time for replication. Backups can therefore be performed both more often and without disrupting IT users’ work while actual recovery is 80 per cent faster than before.”
