Veeam Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Modern Data Center, today announced that Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS), the fifth largest school district in Maryland and the 46th largest in the United States, has replaced its legacy backup, Symantec Backup Exec, with Veeam to ensure the school’s data center is available 24/7, especially during critical events such as online standardized testing, or report card delivery.

AACPS employs more than 5,000 teachers who serve more than 78,000 students from pre-K through 12th grade at more than 100 elementary, middle and high schools. Its data center is currently 70 percent virtualized and, until recently, was using Symantec Backup Exec for both their physical and virtual environments. Unfortunately, Symantec was unable to provide the data center availability AACPS so sorely needed.

With Symantec, Exchange applications would fail with no recovery points, and backups took an exorbitant amount of time to complete. In fact, the backups took so long, that AACPS only protected crucial data; the OS and applications were left out of the nightly backup. What’s more, when AACPS needed to recover data, the process took 18 to 24 hours to complete.

This situation was unacceptable for AACPS, because students, teachers and administrators need the data center to be available, especially during critical events such as standardized testing, which is administered online, or report card delivery. As a result, the district decided to replace their legacy backup system with a data center availability solution from Veeam.

With Veeam, AACPS can protect not just select data, but all data, including the operating system and applications. In addition, with Veeam, AACPS can have an entire virtual machine and its data running again in three minutes thanks to Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery capability, with a complete restore in less than 40 minutes, an 18x improvement over Symantec Backup Exec. AACPS was also impressed with Veeam’s ease-of-use and its ability to replicate to each school for disaster recovery in addition to their offsite disaster recovery facility. Unlike legacy backup products, Veeam’s data center availability solution includes replication at no additional cost.

“It’s really important for us to be able to recover within minutes, during testing time,” said Manish Patel, Senior Systems Admin at AACPS. “Computer labs are a limited resource and schools have a finite window during which they can administer the tests – rescheduling is an enormous headache, and we don’t want the children to get psyched up for the test, only to have it delayed. With Veeam, we can recover the whole operating system and all the applications and data associated with standardized testing in just a few minutes.”

“When I talk to other school systems that are still using legacy backup, I always tell them that there’s a much better solution out there,” Patel continued. “With legacy backup, it takes so much time to recover, and there are times when it’s critical to get things out promptly, like report cards. With Veeam, I know our data center will always be available so that we can deliver on the school system’s expectations.”

“At Veeam, we believe that the era of mere backup is over,” said Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO of Veeam. “Today’s organizations need more than a backup of their data sitting somewhere on a disk on a shelf; they need their data centers to be available 24/7, and that means that they need to be able to recover data quickly. Veeam enables with the “Always–On Business™,” enabling IT organizations to achieve an RTPO™ (recovery time and point objectives) of 15 minutes or less. With Veeam, the data center will always be available.”