Reading, UK, 04 October, 2011: – Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacentre environments, today announced that Europe’s leading regional airline, Flybe, has implemented Veeam Backup & Replication v5 to enable its move to a fully virtualisation-based IT infrastructure. By using the software to backup and recover its virtual machines Flybe will ensure that the e-commerce site www.flybe.com which they support, a lynchpin of the business, is kept operational with minimal downtime. Veeam Backup & Replication is also being used to protect virtual machines housing vital internal applications such as email and digital maintenance manuals for Flybe’s fleet of aircraft.
“With thousands of reservations on an average weekday, it’s no understatement to say that the e-commerce site is the lifeblood of our business,” said James Richards, Virtualisation and Server Specialist at Flybe. “Any disruption of that service represents a potential loss of revenue. At the same time, we cannot afford disruption to our internal infrastructure. The move to virtualisation was already improving the efficiency of our underlying infrastructure. With Veeam we now have greater confidence in the reliability of our virtual estate.”
Flybe began its move to virtualisation in March 2010: the physical architecture that formed the base for both its internal IT and e-commerce site was in need of a refresh and, after reviewing the options, Flybe decided that a virtual infrastructure offered far more benefits. These included reduced power use, floor space and heat emissions as well as the flexibility to provision new machines as appropriate. With the help of its service provider partner Softcat, Flybe virtualised those servers responsible for hosting and running its e-commerce site first. These were followed by some of its internal application servers in December 2010. It has the intention of making its infrastructure almost entirely virtual.
Flybe initially used a native, agent-based backup & recovery solution with its virtual infrastructure. However, due in part to the need to install a software agent on every new machine that was created this proved to be limited in scope. Installing an agent on every machine, as well as using up valuable computing power, became increasingly impractical as the virtual infrastructure grew. As a result it lacked scalability due to the increasingly large amounts of data Flybe needed to backup. At the same time it was cumbersome to track and recover individual files in the event something was lost. Lastly, as with traditional physical back-ups there was no guarantee that a backup server could be fully recovered as this would be mean testing the recoverability of hundreds of daily virtual backups.
With the help of Softcat, Flybe reviewed a number of products, but decided on Veeam due to extremely positive reports and a number of unique features, such as SureBackup recovery verification and instant restoration of backup machines.
Since implementing Veeam Backup & Replication, Flybe has seen a great improvement in its backup and recovery capabilities
For example:
Flybe now backs up hundreds of production virtual servers daily and its test environments are backed up weekly. Backup takes around half the time taken with the previous solution.
Recovery times have been greatly reduced: following a failure of a virtual machine running aircraft maintenance applications it was recovered in minutes, the majority of which was spent simply following processes rather than waiting for recovery.
Flybe uses Veeam’s Universal Application Item Recovery (U-AIR) capabilities, recovering individual Exchange Email items within minutes rather than hours.
Flybe can test all of its backups every day
“Veeam has really helped our virtualisation project take off,” continued James Richards. “Previously, we didn’t have the confidence that our virtual servers would survive any incidents. Now we can be sure that any disruption is limited to minutes rather than hours or even days. As we move closer to an almost completely virtual IT infrastructure, having peace of mind in its ability to recover from any setbacks is crucial. Indeed, we are now in the situation where we can fully restore a machine and users will never be any the wiser.”
About Veeam Software Veeam Software, an Elite VMware Technology Alliance Partner, develops innovative software to manage VMware vSphere. Veeam Backup & Replication with vPower provides advanced Virtualization-Powered Data Protection and is the #1 VM backup solution. Veeam nworks extends enterprise monitoring to VMware and includes the Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware management in Microsoft System Center and the Veeam nworks Smart Plug-in for VMware management in HP Operations Manager. Veeam ONE provides a single solution to optimize the performance, configuration and utilization of vSphere environments and includes: Veeam Monitor for easy-to-deploy VMware monitoring; Veeam Reporter for VMware capacity planning, change tracking and documentation; and Veeam Business View for VMware business service management and categorization. Learn more about Veeam Software by visiting www.veeam.com.
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