Moving to Dell AppAssure from Backup Exec delivers 33% More Storage Space, and a 596% Return on Investment for Sioux County

Environmental Snapshot:

• Exchange mailboxes: 100, on Exchange 2007
• SQL servers: 2
• Windows file servers: 2
• Virtualization: 20 servers – VMware – ESXi
• Data total: 3.5 TB

Business Challenges

Running the administrative needs of a county takes the right combination of foresight combined with prolonged attention to detail. Luckily, Sioux County, IA has just that in its 150 employees who manage everything from county real estate tax management, to court systems, financial systems, human services, law enforcement, and more – and this over almost 800 square miles.

And fortunately enough for Sioux County’s administrative systems, Information Technology Director Micah Van Maanen and his team make sure IT infrastructure supports the integrated needs of Sioux County. Heavily reliant on daily email communication along with the mission-critical applications running on two SQL servers, Van Maanen’s team found themselves severely hampered by the less-than-stellar backup and disaster recovery solution that was protecting Sioux County’s IT infrastructure.

“Anything that is on the network, we are responsible for,” explains Van Maanen. “This includes all the help desk needs, the website support, and all network issues. Increasingly, we were using Symantec’s Backup Exec and having hiccups in our backup routine, and Backup Exec restores were becoming painfully slow. We were devoting more and more time to something that should have just been routine.”

Van Maanen’s team’s backup schedule included doing full backups every weekend with incremental backups during the week. They used two separate tapes every weekend – one for the imaging system and the other for the rest of the data – which worked well enough, but the team kept finding errors. “We really didn’t have a backup window issue, though they were running longer and longer,” says Van Maanen. “The issue was that at least once a month, there’d be a hiccup and we wouldn’t get a full backup. We’d have to go back on Monday night and repeat the process or see if there was a patch out there to solve the problem.”

Van Maanen knew that if the backup process wasn’t entirely reliable, then recovery had the potential to be even more of a challenge. Sioux County’s email is on Exchange 2007, and if it went down, the team would hear about it in a hurry because productivity would stop very quickly. Not only that, but if the SQL servers failed, the tax management systems, the payroll systems, the GIS database, the county attorney database management, and other IT management applications would be at risk because of long restore times.

“If it were just a single file or email, that was quick enough,” says Van Maanen, “but larger restores like for the entire Exchange database would take us some 6-8 hours to get back online. And that’s not the rest of the data, just Exchange. We were confident we could get the data back at some point in time, but we knew we’d lose a lot. We talked to Symantec about this but it wasn’t workable, what they offered. I knew that if we had a disaster, it would take a long time – possibly up to three days – for us to fully recover.”

The final straw for Van Maanen came when Sioux County virtualized a majority of their servers. “With five buildings around Orange City, the county seat, and our servers at one place but the backup servers at another, we needed a backup and disaster recovery solution that could handle the virtualization,” says Van Maanen. “Backup Exec was too expensive for us, and besides, we were ready to move to a new solution and we wanted to go in another direction.”

Sioux County looked at several different solutions, such as Veeam and vRanger Pro, but only Dell AppAssure, with its great backup and disaster recovery solutions for government agencies, gave the county the ability to back up both virtual and physical servers, along with rapid restores at a price point that made sense for their needs.

Solutions

Van Maanen uses Dell AppAssure’s advanced disk imaging ability to make sure all Sioux County’s data is securely protected. By setting the incremental backup snaps to every 15 minutes, Van Maanen’s team can perform lightning-quick restores, should they be necessary. “With Dell AppAssure, we now know we have a good backup. If something happens, we have current data and can restore to a physical or virtual machine,” says Van Maanen. “This has made Sioux County’s disaster recovery planning extremely easy as well. With virtualization, we’re not hardware-dependent, and with Dell AppAssure, we have the ability to restore a complete server quickly because our virtual machines are backed up every 15 minutes. For example, if something were to happen, we’d still be able to run payroll the next day and get people paid on time.”

With Sioux County’s previous solution, if a user created a file in the morning and accidentally deleted it later that same day before the nightly backup happened, the file would be gone with no hope of restoring it. With Dell AppAssure, Van Maanen can get that deleted file or email easily, and can perform a quick restore. “We’d get calls during the day for lost emails or files, and we couldn’t get those files back,” says Van Maanen. “With point-in-time snaps, we can do that easily.”

Results

Reliable backups with quick and easy restores are just the beginning of the benefits that Van Maanen and his team are seeing with Dell AppAssure. Storage space savings has impressed Van Maanen who was surprised by what he was seeing. “Previously, our backup storage would be full after just two weeks of nightly backups,” he says. “Now we can fit ninety six 15-minute snapshots, 48 hourly snapshots, 7 daily snapshots, 4 weekly snapshots, and one monthly snapshot for every server, and we are using only 33% of our disk space! I was shocked and really impressed with the data and the number of snaps we could fit.”

As for Sioux County’s Return on Investment with Dell AppAssure, the numbers speak for themselves:

“We actually didn’t do any ROI before we bought Dell AppAssure,” says Van Maanen, “because we had done the budgeting for this. But I am surprised with the savings, especially in terms of staff time savings. This frees us up to work on other projects, and means we have less time here in the evenings. Plus, Monday mornings are more pleasant as well!”

As for the future, Sioux County’s IT staff remains committed to foresight and attention to detail. This year, they’ll be seeing a third machine up to handle virtual replication for even more comprehensive disaster recovery. Says Van Maanen, “Backup and disaster recovery problems are no longer worries. Dell AppAssure is saving us time, resources, and money.”

About Sioux County, IA

Located in the northwest corner of Iowa, Sioux County has a total area of 769 square miles and is home to 33,704 residents. Sioux County employs 150 people to administer the needs of the county.