Lake Land College avoids potential 300% cost hike with data freedom from Veeam

Lake Land College is recognized as a top community college in the nation by many national and professional accrediting bodies. To maintain its excellent reputation, college administrators are always looking to raise the quality of the organization’s educational offerings and elevate students’ experiences even further.

“Our goals are to increase enrollment and make sure existing students get the most out of their time here,” said James Westendorf, director of technical services at Lake Land College. “As a community college, we do all we can to make our budgets stretch further. However, we often face unexpected costs — such as when our VMware charges increased by 300% following the Broadcom acquisition.”

Lake Land College also increasingly offers online learning opportunities alongside traditional in-person delivery of course content. As a result, ensuring data is always available when users need it is now more important than ever.

“We keep offering new data sources to our students and teaching staff,” said Westendorf. “For example, we recently started digitizing archival videos about the college from all the way back in the ‘60s. We’re also getting more Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which means we need to be able to find and pull up details quickly and efficiently.  Our previous Unitrends backup and recovery toolset didn’t give us sufficient control of our data, so we began looking for an alternative.”

Lake Land College seized the opportunity to enable comprehensive data protection while boosting efficiency by deploying Veeam. The college dove deep into potential options before making its decision.

“What put Veeam on our radar was word of mouth: Everything we heard about the technology was positive,” said Westendorf. “When we compared Veeam to other solutions, what clinched the deal for us was the simplicity of the user interface, the data recovery speed, and the granular restore options. Since then, we’ve been delighted to see how well Veeam integrates with all kinds of hardware — it’s helped us maximize utilization of our investments.”

With Veeam, Lake Land College introduced a 3-2-1-1-0 data protection strategy, where three copies of data are stored on two different types of media, with one copy offline and another one offsite. The college also regularly checks that there are zero errors in their backups. The college relies on Veeam to protect all business-critical systems except for its learning management system.

“Our file servers, our college website, our back-office systems, and more are backed up with Veeam,” said Westendorf. “We back up between 50 TB and 60 TB with Veeam every day and saw our backup failure rate drop immediately; when done correctly, Veeam backups are always error-free. Now, Veeam provides a proactive alert in the rare event that anything goes wrong, so I can go in and fix it before we risk losing data.”

Lake Land College also chose Veeam to safeguard Microsoft 365 data for its staff. The move has made it significantly easier and faster for the college to respond to FOIA requests. Faster data recovery with Veeam across the board is also helping Lake Land College drive better experiences for both students and staff.

“With Veeam, we can restore an entire VM or a specific email or file and do it in seconds rather than the hours it would’ve taken in the past,” said Westendorf. “So, we spend less time searching for information and users spend less time waiting on us. We recently had an employee return to Lake Land College after some time away, and his emails were all gone since the retention period from Microsoft had passed. We were quickly able to restore his entire mailbox up to the day he left with Veeam.”

When Veeam announced it was extending support to Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE), Lake Land College was first in line to take advantage. So far, the organization has moved its Veeam deployment from VMware to Proxmox VE and has plans to extend its usage further.

“Open-source solutions such as Proxmox VE represent a huge cost-saver,” said Westendorf. “The move to Proxmox VE for Veeam was so flawless that we’re now seriously considering migrating all our VMware-based systems, allowing us to eliminate the 300% cost rise that hit us recently. Veeam extending its support to hypervisors such as Proxmox VE gives us greater data freedom, allowing us to quickly change our environment knowing that our data will still be fully protected.”

• Cut data recovery times from days to minutes, driving better student and staff experiences
  Lake Land College can now respond faster to user requests, increasing operational efficiency and satisfaction levels.
• Unlocks an opportunity to avoid 300% cost rises by switching from VMware to Proxmox VE
  “I want to be able to protect my data no matter where it’s located and store my backups wherever I want — and that’s what data freedom through Veeam delivers,” said Westendorf.
• Optimized use of resources through easy integration
  Veeam works seamlessly with a wide range of hardware and software, enabling Lake Land College to capitalize on existing investments and keep its options open for the future.