The Universidad de A Coruña cuts disaster recovery time from weeks to 48 hours with Veeam

To strengthen its status as a top Spanish university, the Universidad de A Coruña (UDC) is always looking to introduce innovations in teaching and research. As a public institution, the UDC also has a responsibility to make the most of the funding it receives from government and public sector administrations.

“The UDC’s central mission is to provide a high-quality public service that benefits society,” said Daniel López, Systems Architect, Infrastructure Department at Universidad de A Coruña. “By offering a forum for social, scientific and technological advances, we work towards the common good. An ongoing challenge is using our public funding as creatively as possible, finding ways to innovate while controlling costs.”

To continue raising the bar for students and staff, the UDC takes advantage of emerging technologies. Over 12 years ago, the university first virtualized its IT infrastructure. Since then, the UDC has embraced cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation solutions.

“We’re always investigating how to harness new technologies to give our students and staff better experiences and to operate more efficiently,” said López. “Whatever tools and features we offer our users, it’s vital that we have the right infrastructure to ensure that they work properly.”

One of the UDC IT team’s key priorities is ensuring non-stop availability of important data and systems. Without this, the university risked affecting its users’ productivity. In response to this challenge, the UDC set out to find a future-proof data protection solution that could scale and adapt seamlessly alongside its fast-changing IT environment.

The UDC first selected Veeam to protect its critical data and IT systems when it adopted virtualization 12 years ago.

“At the time, we evaluated several data protection solutions purpose-built for virtualized IT environments,” said López. “Veeam quickly jumped to the top of the list. Firstly, every similar organization we spoke to recommended Veeam, citing the ease of use and reliability as big pluses. Then we tested it for ourselves and agreed with that assessment. It offers great functionality at a highly competitive price.”

Using Veeam, the UDC transformed its approach to data backups and replication. The university succeeded in boosting operational resilience while reducing manual intervention significantly, helping its IT team work more efficiently.

“We no longer have to review backups daily,” said López. “If anything goes wrong, Veeam alerts us. Our backups now complete in a third of the time that they did previously and use few resources. Thanks to the compression feature built into Veeam, we’ve reduced the storage capacity we need for our backups by about 60%, which translates into a massive cost saving.”

The UDC is also taking advantage of Veeam to improve its disaster recovery (DR) strategy. By enabling the IT team to restore data easily and rapidly, Veeam plays a key role in minimizing disruption to the university’s users.

“With Veeam, we can recover from a crash of our entire IT environment in about 48 hours, whereas previously it would take weeks,” said López. “Last month, we had some of our most critical production servers go down and Veeam allowed us to restore them with just a few mouse-clicks, which was a huge relief!”

In the 12 years since the UDC first deployed Veeam, the university has changed its IT environment dramatically. By scaling and integrating seamlessly to accommodate these changes, Veeam helps the UDC students and faculty innovate freely, confident that its data is always protected.

“Veeam was the right choice for the UDC more than 12 years ago and it’s still the right choice today,” said López. “It has developed alongside the UDC to offer new features and functionalities that meet our emerging needs. As we move more workloads to the Microsoft Azure cloud, it continues to work perfectly. Now we’re testing DR in Azure, and we know the integration between Veeam and Azure will deliver.”

Taking advantage of Veeam’s easy integration with a wide range of technologies, the UDC keeps its options open for the future, reducing risk and complexity.

“No matter what workloads we add or what backup target we choose, Veeam provides exceptional performance,” said López. “As a result of that, we’re now considering protecting our Microsoft 365 and other SaaS solutions with Veeam. Our students and staff are at the center of every decision we make at the UDC, and Veeam continues to help us deliver great value to them.”

• Accelerated disaster recovery from weeks to 48 hours, cutting backup storage utilization by 60% and backup times by 67%. 
  Knowing that we can recover critical data and IT systems in just 48 hours rather than weeks with Veeam is a huge advantage at a university where learning and innovation are happening on a constant basis,” said López. “For our users to flourish, they need maximum availability, and we’re rising to that challenge with Veeam.”
• Recovered from a server outage with just a few mouse-clicks, helping the UDC provide consistently good experiences for 25,000 users. With Veeam, the UDC is driving up its backup success rate to 100%, minimizing the risk of data loss in almost any scenario.
• Offered the UDC reliable data protection for over 12 years and counting, seamlessly accommodating new workloads and environments required by the organization 
  Veeam gives us the future-proof solution we need to take the UDC into the next phase of its digital transformation,” said López. “It’s hardware-agnostic and integrates with all types of applications, making it the right choice for an innovative organization like ours.”