Auckland, New Zealand – April 18, 2018: Hastings District Council can now ensure that its online services are Always-On for residents and has set itself up for future growth, by streamlining its IT environment using an enterprise data management platform from Veeam Software, the Availability for the Always-On Enterprise innovator.
The Council serves nearly 75,000 citizens and has 550 employees across 17 sites. A large proportion of the data held on file at Hastings District Council is residents’ information, such as house plans, consents and registrations. As with most government agencies, the Council also provides online services to residents, making it critical that systems are up and running whenever users need them. Downtime results in lost revenue or worse, angry residents.
“Now, more than ever, availability at scale is a priority for organisations of all kinds, including local government councils,” said Shaun McLagan, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan at Veeam Software. “Consumers and residents have come to expect council information and services to be available to them online 24 hours a day. From parking information, to recycling, to street closures, to booking a pick-up – councils must embrace digital transformation to provide its residents with the level of service and availability they expect.”
The Council, however, was facing more and more issues due to an ageing storage and backup solution which could no longer scale to meet growth capacities. As business units created growing amounts of media rich data, disk space requirements were rapidly increasing. IT staff was using multiple software systems to create the backup, as well as specialised software for the SQL database backups. Overall, the significant amount of time and resources spent on manual intervention required to maintain day-to-day operations resulted in high operational costs and took IT staff away from other tasks.
“Maintaining the systems was terrible,” said Joshua King, Infrastructure Support Officer at Hastings District Council. “The previous architecture used a mix of different software to backup and restore critical council and resident information. It wasn’t reliable and consumed quite a lot of my time to babysit it, checking it, and fixing the backups.”
Hastings District Council needed a solution. Datacom, a Veeam partner which the Council has worked with for more than a decade, won the request for proposal (RFP). The new solution uses Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise Plus and Veeam Cloud Connect to ensure robust, quick backups and constant availability, while reducing complexity and freeing staff to focus on IT operations to help improve the council’s business and offerings to residents.
“The two main drivers in us choosing Veeam were the reliability of the backup solution in its entirety and the ability to scale as our storage increases,” King said.
The Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise Plus solution has dramatically reduced the time Hastings District Council spends monitoring the backup process. Backup times for 28.5 TB of data have reduced by 88%, from more than 16 hours to less than two hours, and the number of backup management tools used has been cut from 4 to just 1, reducing complexity, risk and staff training requirements.
A subset of important servers is replicated to a Veeam Cloud Connect service provider (TIMG). Deduplication and compression means the Council is currently using only 12 TB of their 20 TB capacity.
“When we need to do a restorations,” said King, “it just happens. I can confidently tell our users that if a file was once where they said it was, then we will get it back for them. I have full confidence that Veeam could save the day if an incident occurred. Veeam has helped us protect not only the documents and files created by our staff for our business, but also the intellectual property of our residents, including house plans, consents and licenses.”
Learn more about the future of hyper-availability: Registration is now open for VeeamON 2018, the premier conference for intelligent data management, which will take place May 14 – 16, 2018, in Chicago, IL. Nearly 10,000 customers, partners and influencers attended VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans, LA, and the regional VeeamON Forum events held all around the world. It’s a can’t-miss crash course in how digital data management is evolving in the cloud era.
For more information visit https://www.veeam.com/.
About Veeam Software
Veeam recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Enterprise, a business that must operate 24.7.365. To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility. Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting the current and future business goals of Veeam customers.
Founded in 2006, Veeam has 53,000+ ProPartners and 282,000+ customers with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry. Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Veeam has offices in more than 30 countries. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on Twitter @veeam.