Sell The Real Advantages Of Virtual Recovery
By The Business Solutions Network
A systems integrator wins a $150,000 BDR (backup and disaster recovery) project with a large gaming company by demonstrating the benefits of virtual recovery.
Although virtualization may not get as much press as other technologies such as the cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT), the fact is that virtualization solutions and services are in high demand. Consider this: The procurement and deployment of virtualized servers has more than doubled in the last three years. VMware’s research revealed that virtualized servers are growing at nearly twice the rate of historical physical server procurements and deployments. The study goes on to say that the top five drivers for this shift from physical to virtual servers include reduced hardware costs, server provisioning time reduction, disaster recovery improvements, reduced maintenance/upgrade expenses, and shorter application rollouts.
Mark Melvin, CTO at systems integrator ePlus Technology, can certainly vouch for this trend. With so many advantages, virtualization solutions and services are a staple for his company. A case in point is a recent implementation with a popular video gaming company that makes games for Xbox, PlayStation, and other systems.
A Hardware Refresh Is A Reminder Of Image Backup Restrictions
When ePlus Technology engaged the client, it learned that the gaming company’s storage servers were at 90 percent capacity, and the client wanted to purchase new servers from a different vendor from the one they used previously. “It’s very common for companies with one brand of servers to want other server brands,” says Melvin. “Sometimes the decision is based on performance, sometimes it’s based on price, and sometimes it’s a matter of ‘religious preference.’” The holdup the customer was running into was that it was using a BDR solution that only supported physical imaging. “With this kind of backup, the customer is restricted to restoring data to an environment that’s identical to the one where the backup resides,” says Melvin. “For instance, you can only perform a physical image restore from Brand X server to another Brand X server. What’s more, not only do the two servers have to be the same brand, but also they often need to use the same drivers, operating systems, hypervisors, and CPUs.”
In addition to the gaming company’s legacy BDR being unable to support a mixed server environment, there was another serious concern. “Nightly backups were running all night and not completing until a couple of hours into the start of the next workday,” says Melvin. Although the gaming customer didn’t know exactly how much productivity was being lost each morning, it did make it clear that it was a serious concern.
Virtual Backup And Recovery To The Rescue
ePlus Technology proposed Veeam Backup & Replication v8, a virtual backup and recovery solution from Veeam Software (part of the Veeam Availability Suite) to address its client’s business challenges. To alleviate any reservations, the SI also proposed setting up a proof of concept before doing a live implementation. “We set up a demo in our lab and showed the client how backup and recovery works in a virtual environment,” says Melvin. “We even had them bring us a sample copy of their data to further validate the demo.”
After the demo, the gaming company was ready to move forward, and over the following few months, ePlus Technology implemented and configured the software. “What drew out the implementation was that we had to work around the client’s tight schedule, plus they required a lot of custom configurations,” says Melvin. “For example, some of their applications and files needed to be backed up only once a day, whereas others need to be backed up throughout the day.” When all was said and done, ePlus had installed and configured 100 sockets, and the total project netted $150,000 for the systems integrator.
Immediate Business Benefits Lead To Future Upsell Opportunities
Now, not only is the gaming company able to backup files, folders, applications, and snapshots to any hardware target, but also it can do it more quickly. “Their backup window went from all night long to less than one hour,” says Melvin. “Another nice feature with the Veeam solution is that it supports multiple hypervisors. Since the customer wants to run VMware and Hyper-V, it can now back up all of its virtual machines without having to purchase separate backup software. Additionally, as the customer adds more apps and workloads down the road, it leads to additional upsell opportunities for us.”