The Arabian Geophysical and Surveying Company (ARGAS), has reduced its storage budget by up to 50 % with space savings and operational costs decrease after the company implemented the system from Veeam Software, innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center. ARGAS was suffering from slow and disruptive backup and recovery process that didn`t deliver functionality necessary for always-on business when Veeam provided a reliable solution meeting the company’s recovery time objectives (RTOs).
ARGAS was one of the first companies in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia to virtualize its entire IT infrastructure on Microsoft Hyper-V. Approximately 55 virtual machines (VMs) run every critical application. ARGAS needed to replace its back-up and recover its Hyper-V environment quickly and reliably on its Windows server and so the company deployed Veeam Backup & Replication, part of Veeam Availability Suite v8 . ARGAS had been backing-up VMs to disk manually and the process was time-consuming, meaning that VMs were only backed up on a quarterly basis. In addition the back-ups were large and consumed a tremendous amount of storage space.
“First and foremost we needed a fast and reliable solution,” says Ameer Hussain, IT Manager at ARGAS. “We also needed built-in de-duplication and compression to reduce the size of our back-ups, and we needed something fast so we could back up all our VMs in one day, without shutting down servers. Our interconnected and global business environment does not allow for downtime or data loss so we needed applications available to all our staff every minute of the day.”
The Veeam deployment targeted ARGAS’s pain points by offering high-speed recovery within RTOs and providing data loss avoidance for streamlined disaster recovery. Using proactive monitoring and alerting tools Veeam provided complete visibility, having improved ARGAS`s risk awareness. Prior to the deployment backup tools required hours of monitoring and troubleshooting each day, but now ARGAS spends a few minutes each morning checking Veeam reports before focusing on other tasks.
“It was the only solution to support Hyper-V in Microsoft Windows Server 2012,” said Nouf Al-Dossary, Marketing Executive at FutureTech Solutions, Gold Veeam ProPartner. “Deploying Veeam gives ARGAS a safe and secure backup process that eliminates the issue of server restarts. Veeam is also fast. The first full backup of a massive Microsoft Exchange server took fewer than 20 minutes. When the IT team combined data deduplication in Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with data deduplication and compression in Veeam, backups required approximately 150% less storage space.”
“We anticipate that this space saving will reduce our storage costs by up to 50 percent each year. Before Veeam, it took us two hours to back-up four VMs but with Veeam it takes us four hours to back up 55 VMs. Recovery with Veeam is much faster too; restoring a deleted email takes about three minutes. Data loss avoidance is possible with Veeam. Before, restoring a deleted email could take up to 30 minutes. Now we can meet our RTOs,” adds Hussain.
Being one of the most innovative companies in Middle East, ARGAS places a strong emphasis on keeping up with the current IT trends to meet the demands of modern business. ARGAS requires assurance that the VM running its ERP is backed up and recovered, in addition to having a fast and reliable solution to meet the company’s rising demands to stay connected. Understanding this gap in availability, Veeam implemented its solution to address specific problems experienced by ARGAS, hence to enable the Always-On-Business.
