Birmingham protects city services with Veeam and saves $100,000 in IT costs

Birmingham was established more than 150 years ago at the crossing of two railroad lines near one of the world’s richest deposits of iron ore, coal and limestone. Mining defined the city in the mid 1800s, but over time Birmingham transformed into a powerful banking and business center. Today several Fortune 500 and 1000 companies are based in the city including Regions Financial Corporation and Vulcan Materials.

Birmingham fosters city growth through a progressive business climate. One example is the city’s website, which makes it easy for companies to apply for business licenses, pay for building permits and file taxes. The website streamlines city services for residents too. They can pay parking tickets online, check trash pick-up schedules and submit city-related questions to an online customer service portal. Like most cities, Birmingham also provides police protection and fire and rescue services.

All city services are supported by a modern IT infrastructure. Key applications support fiscal processes, geographical mapping and records management in the police and fire departments.

“The continual operation of city services is clearly paramount, which means we have to have complete confidence in our ability to back up and recover every application supporting every city service,” said Darryl Burroughs, Deputy CIO of Infrastructure Operations for the City of Birmingham. “When we began to lose confidence in our legacy backup solutions, we immediately searched for a replacement.”

David McDonald, Systems Administrator for the City of Birmingham, said there were two solutions. Networker backed up a NAS device comprised of file shares including police and fire records. Unitrends backed up applications.

“Networker backed up the network-attached storage (NAS) device perfectly fine, but Networker isn’t storage neutral, so we couldn’t transition to new storage because we’d be unable to recover data,” McDonald said. “Clearly we have to be able to recover data because it includes police and fire records.”

McDonald said the challenge with Unitrends was different.

“Unitrends had become unreliable and inconsistent, requiring one of our colleagues to spend two to three days each week managing backups. User documentation was dated, so he spent many hours on the phone with tech support — with no results, even after multiple patches and upgrades. Like many city governments, we run thin on personnel, so having someone spend that much time troubleshooting backups was impractical.”

Birmingham considered three replacements for Networker and Unitrends: Avamar, Commvault and Veeam Availability Suite.

“Our requirements were simplicity, flexibility and affordability,” McDonald said. “Simplicity to save on administrative time, flexibility in backup storage and affordability because every city must be cost conscious. Veeam was the only solution to meet all three requirements, and when we compared Veeam pricing to Commvault, Veeam was $50,000 less expensive.”

Veeam helps Birmingham ensure the continual operation of city services. It serves as an anchor for the city’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy and saves a total of more than $100,000 in IT costs and troubleshooting time. In addition, Veeam offers reliable, affordable data protection for cloud workloads in the future.

“Veeam gives us a documented business resumption plan — something that wasn’t possible with the legacy solutions because they didn’t offer visibility like Veeam monitoring and reporting,” Burroughs said. “They also didn’t offer high-speed recovery features like Instant VM Recovery. Anyone on the IT team can use Veeam because every step for backup and recovery is documented. Very little training is required because Veeam is so simple to use.”

Burroughs said this level of simplicity means no one spends two to three days troubleshooting backups, saving approximately $50,000 in employee time annually. And since Veeam was $50,000 less expensive than Commvault, the city saves more than $100,000 overall.

Veeam backs up and replicates 100 TB across 170 VMware vSphere virtual machines and one physical machine to Dell EMC Data Domain on premises and off premises. Because Veeam integrates with Data Domain Boost, backup is 50% faster than before, and because Veeam is storage neutral, it backs up and restores content on the city’s NAS device quickly and easily, including police and fire records.

“I can’t express how important it is that Veeam is protecting these records,” McDonald said. “Our records include investigations and photographic evidence going back decades. Reliable data protection is what we appreciate most about Veeam. It’s what will give us peace of mind if we transition to cloud computing in the future.”

Veeam helps cities like Birmingham manage backup to the cloud, from the cloud and within the cloud. Whether cities are moving production workloads to the cloud or leveraging an off-site cloud target for long-term retention and disaster preparedness, Veeam supports them on their cloud journey.

“No matter what we’re planning for the future or what we’re currently encountering, we know we can get instant support from Veeam, and that’s something else we appreciate,” Burroughs said. “The Veeam solution is consistently reliable, and so are the Veeam people.” 

• Ensures continual operation of city services and helps anchor the BC/DR strategy
  “We chose Veeam over Avamar and Commvault because it was the only solution to deliver on all three requirements: simplicity, flexibility and affordability,” Burroughs said. “Veeam is a consistent and stable enterprise-ready solution.”
• Saves Birmingham more than $100,000 in IT costs and troubleshooting time
  “Many cities have small IT teams like ours, so knowing that a junior person can easily operate Veeam and recover data in a crisis is hugely beneficial,” McDonald said.
• Offers reliable, affordable data protection for cloud workloads in the future
  Veeam helps cities accelerate cloud adoption, actualize savings in the cloud and achieve DR and compliance goals through long-term retention and disaster readiness.