As you are certainly aware, our mission here at ScholarBuys is to assist the academic community with our technology procurement expertise and knowledgeable service. Through communication such as this, we hope to deliver impactful information about the products and services we have identified as being key players in their respective spaces. We also want to share the successes of institutions we partner with so that, should your institution be faced with similar challenges, you have information at your fingertips to help guide you through selecting a solution based on the experiences of like-minded campuses.
I would like to share a case study with Wofford College, who recently adopted Veeam Backup and Replication to refocus their strategy for backup and availability in the event of a service outage. They also recently upgraded their Veeam licensing to the Enterprise edition to further increase the automation of their backup solution, along with increasing speed and performance for backup jobs. With the upgrade to Veeam Backup and Replication Enterprise, Wofford has further simplified the management of their datacenter.
Wofford College, established in 1854, is an independent liberal arts college located in Spartanburg, S.C. It offers bachelor’s degrees in 26 major fields of study, and is well known for its programs leading to graduate and professional studies (medicine and other health professions, law, commerce, and advanced graduate study across academic disciplines). The college is committed to providing superior students an undergraduate education defined by excellence, engagement, and transformation. Their vision is continue with their path of being an innovative and distinctive national liberal arts college, preparing students for meaningful lives as citizens, leaders and scholars.
I have worked with Wofford College’s Security Coordinator and Server Manager – Matt Fisher – for several years on a wide variety of technology projects for the campus. We had discussed several competing solutions when he brought this project to my attention, and based on their business needs it was determined that Veeam Backup and Recovery would be the ideal fit.
“For years we used another product for our virtual environment, as well as a separate backup solution for the physical environment. We had three goals we wanted to meet: (1) The virtual backup software we were using at the time was always behind in technology and compatibility with the latest hypervisor versions so we wanted a product that stayed up to date with the latest technologies and hypervisors. (2) We wanted to use one product that would do both virtual and physical environments with small overhead and easy management. (3) We needed a product that would also perform database backups/restores for both SQL and Oracle.”
Flexibility and ease of management were two areas of particular concern. ScholarBuys was able to provide experienced guidance on the feature availability across editions of Veeam’s solutions, which brought us eventually to an upgrade to the Enterprise Edition. After adoption, Wofford was able to notice significant benefits in this transition:
“The changeover to Veeam Enterprise has been rewarding. We now have all of our systems being backed up under one platform that meets all our current goals. The backup speeds are far greater than we had before which has reduced our backup window big time and the storage space needed has been reduced greatly. Backup and Restoring of Databases and AD objects are super simple which is a big plus for us as well. Also having the vCenter plugin is nice for quick and easy on demand backups of VMs thru the vCenter console, this is really useful when you want something longer term than a snapshot.”
The Enterprise edition of Veeam Backup & Replication is a step-up to the Standard edition, which enabled Wofford to take advantage of additional feature sets such as:
- Full features of Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft, and Veeam Explorer for Oracle
- Self-service features:
- 1-Click File and VM recovery portal for help desk operators
- Microsoft Exchange item recovery portal
- Database recovery portal for Microsoft SQL DBAs
- Data Loss Avoidance:
- ROBO Guest Interaction Policy
- Backup I/O control (limited)
- Storing Backups:
- Proxy affinity
- Deduplicating storage integrations
- Per-VM backup files for deduplicating storage
- File-selective, image level processing
- Built-in WAN Acceleration (limited)
- Scale-out Backup Repository (limited)
- Replication:
- 1-Click failover orchestration
- Centralized Management Web UI (Veeam Enterprise Manager)
- Guest file system indexing
Overall, Wofford has had an excellent experience with the product and it has enabled them to have significantly greater confidence in their backup strategy for both physical and virtual endpoints in their environment. Ease of use, and greater visibility, has increased Wofford’s agility from the perspective of information technology.
“So far I have enjoyed working with Veeam B&R as it was easy to setup and just works. Honestly is very hands off which is what I like about it. Being able to use Tags is vCenter for backups makes adding new VMs into policies an automatic process. This has been a great purchase for us because it just works, it does what it supposed to do and with very little administration needed after initial setup.”
Business continuity can be approached from many angles, and Veeam happened to be the right fit for Wofford College.
