INDUSTRY WATCH
PRIOR TO VEEAM, WE
WERE SPENDING A FEW
HOURS EVERY WEEK
TRYING TO FIX OUR
BACKUP ISSUES.
tThe business challenge
Data has become integral to life at
James Cook University for students and
staff alike. Students, both on campus
and online, can access over 129,000
hours of recorded lectures and other
video materials, with over 730,000
logged views. As Head of James Cook
University’s ICT Infrastructure Services,
Swain Kirk, said: “Our data is exploding
like never before.”
With several campuses and locations
across Australia and overseas as well
as students connecting from across the
world, all the university’s content, from
course materials to email and documents,
needs to be available all the time. Data
availability was the top priority on Kirk’s
team agenda. “We looked at our backup
environment and realized the capacity
around the legacy system licensing deal
constrained us,” he said. “It wasn’t going
to be able to support our growth, which is
in the order of terabytes weekly.”
The university discovered not only that
there were constraints around its existing
service licensing, but it was also costing
even more time (and therefore money)
because the ICT team had to change
to suit the legacy backup and recovery
system rather than the other way around.
Every time the needs of the ICT team
met the limits of the old environment, it
required an expensive and cumbersome
rework of backup policies.
“Prior to Veeam, we were spending a few
hours every week trying to fix our backup
issues,” said Kirk. “Due to the licensing
model, we were not able to back up the
entire workload, which left a large portion
of our workloads not being protected.”
In addition, James Cook University uses
Office 365 for staff and students. The
university needed a solution that could
not only improve data management
within its data centers, but also cover
critical business data stored and
operating within Microsoft’s Office 365
SaaS. As such, the university is running a
pilot of Veeam for Office 365 backup on
high value assets.
The Veeam solution
When James Cook University opened its
tender process, it decided to choose a
partner and a product that moved with,
and adhered to, its needs as they grew,
rather than the other way around.
With content residing on all types of
systems from traditional physical servers
to cloud services such as Office 365,
integration was crucial for JCU as the
university believes that backup and
replication are the engines that drive
availability. “It’s not just about backup,”
Kirk said, “It’s easy to back up, but it’s
the ability to restore data in an efficient
manner that counts.”
Veeam’s Availability Platform offered
JCU a solution that it could count on.
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