A city is only as good as the utilities it provides, so when Birmingham’s IT team began to lose faith in the two backup solutions protecting the city’s services, they immediately sought a replacement and decided to select Veeam.
Birmingham, nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians, was established more than 150 years ago at the intersection of two railway lines near one of the richest deposits of iron ore, coal and limestone in the world. world. Mining defined the Alabama town in the mid-1800s, but over time Birmingham grew into a powerful banking and trading center. Today, several Fortune 500 and 1000 companies are based in the city, including Regions Financial Corporation and Vulcan Materials.
Birmingham promotes the city’s growth through a progressive business climate. One example is the city’s website, which makes it easy for businesses to apply for business licenses, pay building permits, and file taxes. The website also streamlines city services for residents. They can pay for parking tickets online, check garbage collection 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. The main applications support tax processes, geographic mapping and records management in police and fire departments.
“The continued operation of city services is clearly paramount, which means we must have complete confidence in our ability to backup and restore every application supporting every city service,” said Darryl Burroughs, IT Director Infrastructure Operations Deputy for the City of Birmingham. “When we started to lose faith in our old backup solutions, we immediately looked for a replacement.”
City of Birmingham system administrator David McDonald said: “Obviously we need to be able to recover the data as it includes police and fire department records. Like many city governments, we’re understaffed, so it wasn’t practical for someone to spend time troubleshooting backups.
Birmingham considered three replacements for legacy systems.
“Our requirements were simplicity, flexibility and affordability,” McDonald said. “Simplicity to save administrative time, flexibility in backup storage and affordability, because every city needs to be cost-conscious.” Veeam was the only solution to meet all three requirements.
The Veeam Solution
Veeam helps Birmingham keep the city’s services running smoothly. It serves as the anchor for the city’s business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) strategy and saves over $100,000 in total IT costs and troubleshooting time. Additionally, Veeam provides reliable and affordable data protection for future cloud workloads.
“Veeam provides us with a documented disaster recovery plan, which wasn’t possible with older solutions because they didn’t provide visibility like Veeam’s monitoring and reporting,” Burroughs said. “They also didn’t offer high-speed recovery features like Instant VM Recovery. Everyone on the IT team can use Veeam because every step of backup and recovery is documented. Very little training is necessary because Veeam is so easy to use.
Burroughs said this level of simplicity means no one spends two to three days troubleshooting backups, which saves about $50,000 in labor time per year.
Veeam backs up and replicates 100TB across 170 VMware vSphere virtual machines and one physical machine to Dell EMC Data Domain onsite and offsite. Because Veeam integrates with Data Domain Boost, backup is 50% faster than before, and because Veeam is storage neutral, it quickly and easily backs up and restores content to the NAS device in town , including police and fire department records.
“I cannot express how important it is for Veeam to protect these records,” McDonald added. “Our records include investigations and photographic evidence dating back decades. Reliable data protection is what we value most at Veeam. This is what will give us peace of mind if we move to cloud computing in the future. »
Veeam helps cities like Birmingham manage backup to the cloud, from the cloud, and in the cloud. Whether cities are moving production workloads to the cloud or leveraging an offsite cloud target for long-term retention and disaster preparedness, Veeam supports them in their journey to the cloud.
“No matter what we’re planning for the future or what we’re currently experiencing, we know we can get instant support from Veeam and that’s something else we appreciate,” Burroughs said. “The Veeam solution is always reliable, as are the people at Veeam. »
The results
- Ensures the continuous operation of city services and helps to anchor the BC/DR strategy:
“We chose Veeam because it was the only solution that met all three requirements: simplicity, flexibility and affordability,” Burroughs said. “Veeam is a consistent and stable enterprise-ready solution. - Saves Birmingham over $100,000 in IT costs and troubleshooting time
“Many cities have small IT teams like ours, so knowing that a junior person can easily use Veeam and recover data in a crisis is hugely beneficial,” McDonald added. - Delivers reliable and affordable data protection for future cloud workloads
Veeam helps cities accelerate cloud adoption, save money in the cloud, and meet DR and compliance goals through long-term retention and disaster preparedness
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