Municipality Saves Money (2x ROI), Time (4 Hours to 5 Minutes), and Storage Space (up to 450x) after Switching to Dell AppAssure Software

Environmental Snapshot:

• Exchange mailboxes: 180
• SQL servers: 5
• Windows file servers: 5
• Virtualization: Hyper-V 3 Node cluster with 20 guest OSes
• Total Data: 7.5TB

In a time of serious budget belt-tightening, no one knows more about doing more with less than local municipalities. Hit with severe cutbacks in financial and staff resources over the last couple of years, most cities are asking their departments to find ways to save serious money.

Derek Kruger, IT Supervisor for the city of Safford, Ariz. has seen this first hand. “We’ve already had a couple of rounds of staff layoffs city-wide,” says Kruger. “Our IT department is now just three people.” Kruger’s team has precious few resources to squander on non-functioning backups or lengthy restores of critical data, which could include anything from financial records, to library programs – from SharePoint to Microsoft BackOffice; from the OS to cartography data. Yet, Kruger found that they’re doing just that: struggling with backups that never happened and restores that took four-plus hours, if the data was there.

(Dell AppAssure’s innovative software permits Hyper-V backup, Windows Server backup, Microsoft Exchange backup, Microsoft SQL Server backup which goes beyond protecting your data by protecting your entire application.)

“Awhile ago we used Symantec’s Backup Exec and did backups to tape,” explains Kruger. “I have to say, I’m not sure we ever really got this working well. Also, we had so much data. I just couldn’t back it all up in the amount of time we had at night.” After Backup Exec, Kruger tried disk imaging with Asempra, which worked fine until it got too expensive for Safford. So the team decided to try another solution.

Before Dell AppAssure: No Application Monitoring

“At first it seemed ok,” says Kruger. “The problem was that we were using Drobo and Drobo Elite. It all seemed to work well for three to four days, but then the Drobo box would just die.” As Kruger’s team found out, they were flooding it with too much data. “This other solution didn’t let us throttle back very well either,” says Kruger. “We’d hack away at it, but we’d end up in a situation where we’d have a non-standard backup that only I knew how to configure. It was a huge hassle.”

As the city’s data and server needs grew, the IT team found itself constantly monitoring the backup system. “The thing is, it was unreliable. It wouldn’t throw up an error that something was wrong,” says Kruger. “We’d go in and look at the log files and it would look like it was working. It went four days one time and it looked like it was fine, but then I tried to do a restore, and I could restore a file from four days before, but couldn’t restore any of the snapshots within that time period.”

Aware that backups are only part of the equation, Kruger took to doing random restores just to see if he could get the data back when he needed it. “Every month or so, I do a restore at random because I’ve been burned by backups,” says Kruger. “I discovered that the longest I could do was about three weeks before something happened. We used this solution for six months but never got more than three weeks of consistent backups.”

The final straw was a long weekend not so long ago, when Safford’s administrative offices had a power failure. Kruger ended up having to drive down to the office and restart the systems. Everything came back up online, but the backup solution couldn’t recognize any of the backups. “I struggled with this for over a week,” laments Kruger. “I even went so far as to reload the server and try to import the database back in.”

“I was never able to get anything out of it, and when another department needed a file they lost from the previous week, I couldn’t get it. It was gone. That’s when I said, let’s find a good product. Whatever its cost, it’s not worth this hassle.”

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) in a Virtualized Environment

At 23 servers, Kruger knew he needed a reliable CDP solution that wouldn’t break the bank. “We have to backup MS SQL Server, backup Windows server, backup Exchange, and backup our Hyper-V cluster,” says Kruger. “We went from nightly backups to CDP almost instantly. I just took our existing hardware and threw on the application. On some of the critical servers – like Exchange and SQL – we’re taking images every hour. There is no difference in user performance, even at this rate. Nobody even knows that the backups are happening.”

The team uses Dell AppAssure’s application health monitoring for corruption issues on all the servers, and Kruger can now see that he’s getting reliable backups. In his random restore testing, the staff’s time has gone from almost four hours with the previous solution without the granularity Kruger needed, to just five minutes. “Just a couple of weeks ago I recovered a budget spreadsheet for my boss,” says Kruger. “I spent more time looking for the file than restoring it. It took five minutes total.”

In addition, Dell AppAssure is protecting Safford’s host systems in their virtualized environment. “Our primary domain controller is on a 10-year-old server,” notes Kruger. “Replacing it is going to be difficult, but now we have the option of bringing it up as a virtual. And with our SharePoint, I was able to virtualize it and then take the physical offline. For disaster recovery – let’s say something happens to City Hal – I can now bring up our virtual machines in a different building if need be.”

Dell AppAssure’s Superior Deduplication & Compression

Kruger and his team are not only saving hours of staff time by using Dell AppAssure’s continuous data protection backup solution, but the storage space the city of Safford is getting with Dell AppAssure’s superior deduplication and compression has astounded Kruger. “We’re snapping several of the servers every hour, some two hours, and one just once a week. Our retention policy is one month, so I was hoping for 50% compression, but we’re well over 60% and still going strong,” he says. The stats speak for themselves:

• Dell AppAssure is protecting five different servers with 4 SQL and 1 Hyper-V host: 677GB > 5.7GB. 119x storage space savings
• Dell AppAssure protects the email server/Exchange 2003: 354GB > 2G = 177x
• Dell AppAssure protects the data server and another Hyper-V host box with the cluster shared volume on it: 5.7TB > 12.42GB = 469x

Kruger’s comment on the savings? “HELL, YEAH! I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all this extra storage space!” he says.

The City of Safford Gets a Solid ROI with Dell AppAssure

Not only is Dell AppAssure giving the city of Safford award-winning continuous data protection, high availability, Hyper-V protection, and outstanding dedup/compression, but it’s also saving them money, day by day. On the licensing, hardware, software, and maintenance, Kruger’s team is seeing a savings of $95,500 alone. But this number gets bumped up considerably when the wasted staff time for backup monitoring and failed restores is factored in.

“We’ve got at least a 2x ROI here and this a good thing. I’m going to take it to the next council meeting!” laughs Kruger.

Safford Looks Forward

Kruger’s team now has a partner in Dell AppAssure as they move forward. “We’ll start doing replication sometime soon and moving machines into another building,” says Kruger. ”But for now, I don’t worry about backups anymore. I mean, nobody gives a damn if you’re backing stuff up. All they care about is the restore and if you can’t give it to them, you’re not doing your job. With Dell AppAssure, we’re doing our job.”

Kruger can rely on the whole Dell AppAssure team to help his team do just that, his job. “Not only is the product great, but Dell AppAssure’s support helped me to streamline our setup and helped with a VSS issue,” notes Kruger. “They’re very responsive, very knowledgeable. Good at keeping me in the loop. I don’t feel I’m out here all by myself. I’m obviously very, very happy.”

About the City of Safford, Arizona

The city seat of Graham County, Ariz., the City of Safford is located at the base of Mt. Graham (home to the University of Arizona’s Mount Graham International Observatory where multiple organizations have several large telescopes including the LBT (Large Binocular Telescope). With approximately 30,000 citizens in the surrounding area, Safford’s primary industry is mining, with the newest mine in the U.S. (The aptly named Safford Mine) located just north of the city. Cattle and cotton also play a huge role in the area’s economy, with the Pima cotton strain named after the nearby town of Pima, often called “Desert Snow” as the fields in bloom look like snow has fallen upon them.