Like many companies, PricewaterhouseCoopers South Africa (PwC) hoped its legacy backup solution for physical servers would perform just as well in a virtualised environment. But as the company approached complete virtualisation, says Senior Manager for Hosted Services Pieter Kruger, it became clear that the legacy tool was no longer sustainable.
With nearly 400 virtual machines (VMs) in the PwC environment, Kruger says it was taking days to recover a single machine; and limited reporting and monitoring capabilities made it difficult to manage the environment proactively.
“We wanted a more agile backup and recovery solution that was suited specifically to the virtual environment,” says Kruger. “We also wanted to back up our VMs to disk using deduplication because backing up to tape and storing tapes offsite had made the day-to-day file-level recovery process longer than it needed it to be.”
Kruger says Veeam Backup Management Suite has revolutionised the way PwC protects its data.
“We have complete trust in our backup environment now, and we’re confident we can achieve a 100% successful recovery rate. We’re not worried about corrupt backups anymore. When we get requests for restores, we can have the data at our fingertips almost immediately.”
Veeam has proved fast and cost-effective as well as trustworthy, says Kruger.
“Instant VM Recovery is my favourite feature. Being able to boot a VM directly from a backup and restore it in minutes was a game-changer for us. That’s one of the reasons why Veeam provides much better overall value than the other backup tools. If we look specifically at cost, Veeam was 20% less expensive than our legacy tool.”
Kruger and his team are also using Veeam to gain great much visibility and proactive control over their environment.
“We wanted automated, 24/7 monitoring capabilities because manually monitoring our VMs was not giving us the information we needed to manage them. For example, when colleagues phoned to say they were having a problem accessing an application, we had to manually monitor the VM to determine what issues were going on. It took quite a bit of time to isolate exactly what was causing the issues.
“With Veeam, we can pull reports over almost any period of time and determine exactly which component is causing issues. With a few ticks, we can fix the problem in minutes, saving us countless hours every month.”