Reading, United Kingdom, May 3rd 2011: Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacentre environments, today announced that it has completed a deal with Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust to supply its award-wining Veeam Backup & Replication v5 to the organisation. The deal means that Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust will now be able to back up, test and recover critical virtual infrastructure which services essential IT functions in departments such as Accident & Emergency and Pathology in a fraction of the time previously possible.
Following an evaluation with competitive products, Veeam Backup & Replication will now help Gateshead Health guarantee its IT services are available 24/7 across its three sites and 2,500 users.
“Like any other public sector body in the current climate, we are under pressure to reduce costs without affecting service,” said Jon Potts, Infrastructure Manager at Gateshead Health. “Virtualising our IT infrastructure has proved a vital step in allowing us to keep costs down while maintaining the levels of service a foundation trust requires. However, this virtual infrastructure still needs to meet our own, rigorous business continuity needs. It underpins the IT of our most critical departments, such as Accident & Emergency and Pathology, which need services such as patient records and diagnostics to function 24/7. Any failure here won’t just take time: it could easily cost lives. Veeam Backup & Replication has ensured we suffer minimal downtime. It has also allowed us to test all of our backups to verify they will recover without any extra cost. This provides us with a level of resilience we never had with physical world infrastructure and backups.”
Gateshead Health currently has 80 virtualised servers in its infrastructure, together with 40 physical. The Trust is currently aiming to virtualise its entire physical IT infrastructure, in order to gain the maximum benefits and cost savings from the technology. As part of the ongoing virtualisation project, Gateshead Health wanted to upgrade its backup and recovery tools. Since its previous solution wasn’t designed specifically for virtualisation, virtual machine backup and recovery was a slow, complex process.
Gateshead Health, in collaboration with its IT Services partner SITS Group, decided that a solution designed specifically to deal with virtual machines would be the best option to guarantee the continuous operation of its virtual infrastructure. Gateshead Health went through a demo and testing process, comparing a number of products. Veeam Backup & Replication was selected as it had the best performance and usability of the three, thanks to its vPower technology. Specific points that were raised included Veeam Backup & Replication’s near-instant recovery times, ability to verify the recoverability of all backups, capability to manage more machines, lower cost and richer variety of functions, including the ability to create isolated testing environments and to run a virtual machine directly from the backup if needed.
The extra functionality Veeam Backup & Replication provided meant it perfectly suited Gateshead Health’s future plans for its virtual environment. It is now being rolled out across the virtual infrastructure: currently 26 virtual machines are backed up by Veeam Backup & Replication, with more to follow.
“We chose Veeam Backup & Replication v5 for its power, its potential and its ease of use,” said Jon Potts. “At the moment, our primary concern is rolling out Veeam Backup across our entire virtual infrastructure: when this is complete, we will be able to provide a fully functional, fully protected virtual environment using a fraction of the space and resources of a physical alternative. As close to 100% of our infrastructure becomes virtualised, the ability to, for example, create isolated testing environments on our backup infrastructure will prove invaluable in allowing us to trail new services, applications and infrastructure without having to invest in extra computing resources or risk affecting the main environment. As a result, we will be able to continue expanding and improving our IT infrastructure whilst minimising both the cost to the taxpayer and the chances of IT failure.”
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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