Veeam brings virtual server backup for NHS trust

NHS trust gets Veeam virtual server backup

The Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust has implemented Veeam Backup & Replication for virtual server backup and brought restoration times down to minutes.

The trust is a health care provider that serves more than 600,000 patients and three data centres containing 168 physical servers and 217 virtual servers. It started to virtualise servers in 2005, and more than 75% of its IT services are set to run on virtual machines by the end of 2011, but its disaster recovery capabilities had not kept pace with the upgraded environment.

When the decision was made to implement a specialised disaster recovery tool, the trust reviewed two products, from which Veeam Backup & Replication was chosen on grounds of cost and product features. Veeam allows the trust to replicate its entire virtual infrastructure at 50% of the initially budgeted cost. It also allows multiple roll-back points and can be scaled to any number of virtual machines. Implementation was carried out with Veeam service provider partner NCE.

Kevin Woodley, data centre manager at Oxford Health Informatics Service, said Veeam helped pay for itself within days of implementation.

He said, “Within the first week of installation, one of our live production servers hung. Normally, the solution would be to power off and power on again, but this time the server failed to boot. Traditionally, this would have required a full rebuild and potentially long downtime. With Veeam installed, we were able to boot the DR replica and have a live system operating again within three minutes.”

Buffalo launches new Windows NAS family

Small-office/home-office (SOHO) NAS vendor Buffalo Technology has announced the launch of the TeraStation Pro Windows Storage Server (WSS). The family of RAID-enabled storage devices is available in two-, four- and six-bay models, as well as the four-bay TeraStation Pro Rackmount, and ship pre-configured in RAID 5. The TeraStation Pro WSS provides advanced features such as centralised management; Distributed File System replication; and, on selected models, single-instance storage and Read-only Domain Controller (RoDC) support.

Coraid partners with The Blueprint IT

ATA over Ethernet SAN vendor Coraid has announced it signed a Gold partnership agreement with The Blueprint IT, a UK consultancy that delivers hosting services. Marcos Burnett, EMEA sales director at Coraid, said, “This strategic partnership will help us strengthen our position in the UK and build on our early wins in the cloud computing market.”

Dot Hill appointments

Dot Hill Systems has announced the appointment of two storage industry veterans. Brad Painter has been named vice president of worldwide channel sales, while Scott Brooks will take on the new position of vice president of customer services and sales. Painter joins Dot Hill from Pillar Data Systems, where he served as vice president of worldwide channel sales. Brooks joins from LSI’s Engenio Storage Group.

Most customers invoke DR plan for IT outages

In the first six months of this year, 94 percent of customers of Leeds-based IT services company ICM that invoked their disaster recovery plan did so due to IT problems, with only 6 percent doing so for more dramatic incidents such as fire or flood. This means that the day-to-day causes of invocation, such as hardware failure or infrastructure loss, are 15 times more likely to occur than a flood or fire. John Mills, director of business continuity and infrastructure at ICM, said, “In our experience, many organisations focus on the likelihood of a major disaster when deciding to implement a business continuity plan. However, our invocation statistics prove it is the ordinary and not the dramatic that have significant impact, more often.”

iland and Acronis team up

iland Internet Solutions, a provider of cloud infrastructure services, and Acronis, a provider of disaster recovery and data protection solutions, have announced the global expansion of their joint cloud-based business continuity solution. The companies’ partnership is focused on providing their partners and businesses with the flexibility to quickly recover locally and in the cloud with a single, easy-to use-solution. The services will use Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 to provide backup and recovery capabilities.

Infortrend offers free features

Array maker Infortrend plans to offer users of its entry-level EonStor DS systems free trial licenses for thin provisioning and remote replication data services. Thin provisioning allows users to allocate a large amount of virtual capacity for an application server—regardless of the physical capacity actually available. Remote replication enables users to deploy full data copies across storage systems at different sites, either in synchronous or asynchronous mode.

StorageCraft Europe appointment

StorageCraft Europe has appointed Michael Breitenmoser as its new marketing director, strengthening the existing marketing team. Before joining StorageCraft Europe, Breitenmoser was head of marketing and product management at Swiss ISP Netstream.