Veeam® Software, the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™, has announced that The National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC) has implemented Veeam Availability Suite™ to deliver round the clock availability of all the virtualised applications in its data centre that helps keep South Africa safe.
The NDMC coordinates disaster preparedness programmes and relief services in South Africa. As part of the Department of Cooperative Governance, the NDMC coordinates national, provincial, and municipal spheres of government in terms of all aspects of disaster management and widespread emergencies. The NDMC is responsible for safety at all major events including prestigious past events such as the FIFA World Cup in 2010, African Cup of Nations 2013, and Nelson Mandela’s funeral in 2013.
This is all done through mission-critical reporting systems, used by people on the ground, collecting information. It is the NDMC’s responsibility to have the latest information with regards to any disaster-related problem. If the systems are down, or not available, the NDMC will be unable to inform the country of any disaster-related issues. As such, the IT operations of the NDMC is the heart of its business operation.
Unfortunately, the existing legacy backup tool frequently failed or was delayed, resulting in too few recovery points. It also did not have built-in replication and failover was not a seamless process. Having limited recovery points and data that could potentially be unavailable, the NDMC needed a new solution to address any potential failure that could negatively impact the country.
“We needed a single, easy-to-use solution that offered reliable backup, deep monitoring, and straightforward replication for disaster recovery. Our mission is to provide 24.7.365 availability to all applications, especially the system-reporting tool,” says Riaz Moolla, Infrastructure Manager at the NDMC.
After careful evaluation, the NDMC decided on the Veeam Availability Suite running on HPE StoreServ hardware.
“Veeam Availability Suite combines backup, recovery, replication, monitoring, reporting, and capacity planning, making it an ideal platform for an Always-On enterprise such as the NDMC. The suite also features built-in replication so staff members can quickly recover a corrupted virtual machine by failing over to its replicate at the disaster recovery site. The NDMC now has the peace of mind to keep focusing on meeting its mandate of ensuring the safety of all major events taking place in the country, while Veeam takes care of disaster recovery,” says Moolla.
The organisation is currently sitting at 90% capacity of its current data store. When the NDMC implemented the Veeam solution, the capacity of its virtual machines was three terabytes and the physical drives were two terabytes. Subsequently, the storage space has doubled, simply because of the activities that are taking place around the entire environment. Veeam monitor tool has enabled the NDMC to plan its licence procurement for the purchase of additional storage area network drives.
“Now it is so much easier to manage backups, recovery, and disaster recovery. It is just as easy to restore files and application items from endpoint backups as it is from VM backups. Veeam enables us to easily identify where the problems in our disaster recovery lie. What previously took us a significant amount of man hours to do, Veeam manages automatically,” adds Moolla.
“The NDMC is assessing every possible risk throughout the country and preparing a corresponding plan for disaster recovery, and its IT staff has a similar responsibility in its data centre. As such, the mission-critical nature of the data centre means it has to be able to continue operations in the event of a disaster. Veeam enables IT organisations to achieve an RTPO™ (recovery time and point objectives) of 15 minutes or less. That means that with Veeam, the NDMC`s data centre will always be available,” says Claude Schuck, Regional Manager for Africa at Veeam.
