Maryland Public School System Moves from Tape to DR with Recovery Point

The school system had relied on managing their own backup service since 2017. However, when their previous backup vendor proposed a $250,000 renewal contract, the school realized that the existing storage option no longer aligned with their budget. Recovery Point was called in to discuss BaaS (Backup as a Service) options where Recovery Point would replace their hardware and software backup service with a more cost-effective solution.

Recovery Point recommended a storage-agnostic approach using Veeam backup storage where the school system could select any hardware storage and still maintain their budget.

As with any complicated project, there were challenges. The school system supported 1,000 physical servers as well as VMware, with the ecosystem consisting of legacy software/operating systems and obsolete 2008 servers running SQL. In addition, inaccuracies in backup status reporting were an ongoing concern, while the internal IT staff managing the backups was not the same team as the one running the servers. And finally, variable costs were particularly difficult for this client to absorb because as a public school system, it had to adhere to an annual budget approved by the county.

Recovery Point determined that Veeam Enterprise Manager was the best backup tool for a new BaaS solution since it allowed different groups to perform restores and backups and provided a cost-effective solution overall. Technical advantages included a 30-day retention window for any file, and compression and dedupe capabilities that accommodated both physical and virtual servers. The client also switched to Recovery Point’s S3 Cloud which is offered at a fixed cost based on storage usage, thereby accommodating their budget constraints.

“We do not prefer variable costs, so when Recovery Point stated the availability of S3 storage at a fixed cost based on storage usage, it was more appealing.” – Maryland Public School System Client

With Recovery Point’s BaaS Veeam solution and S3 Cloud, the school system now enjoys terabytes of space saving on their servers and the ability to restore a single file without restoring an entire VM. In addition, deduplication and compression occurs across a large number of VMs, and physical agents are now managed from one ‘pane of glass’ dashboard that includes the ability to install, configure, update, remove and modify all agents. Overall, backups now happen in 15 minutes instead of eight hours, drastically improving the client’s backup response.