Groton Utilities Provides Comprehensive Data Protection With DXi, Scalar Tape, and Veeam

Groton Utilities provides water, power, and other services for a wide area of Southeastern Connecticut, including the City of Groton. The IT team’s approach to backup and disaster recovery (DR) protection has evolved over the years. When the servers were all physical, backups were written to a tape library. As servers became 95% virtualized, disk became part of the strategy.

The team selected software from Veeam because it handled VMs more effectively, and as data volumes increased, it addedQuantum DXi deduplication appliances。

Tape Delivers Protection Against Ransomware

“We have long been committed to a 3-2-1 approach to protection,” says Tom O’Farrell, Groton Utilities system administrator, “but it took quite a bit of work to make sure we have at least three copies of data, in two different locations, with one copy off-site.”

磁带提供重要的防止恶意软件。“We have seen the damage and costs that recent ransomware attacks have created, and we know the best protection is having a kind of ‘air gap’—keeping a copy of critical data on tape that is isolated from the vulnerable spinning disk.” The IT team created a configuration using the two different data centers and disk-to-disk replication. Veeam backs up the VMs to the DXi appliance, and the team’s legacy backup application creates tapes.

Reducing Complexity For The Next Stage

“It works,” O’Farrell explains, “but it is too complicated for me. There are still too many steps and vendors involved. Replicating primary data between sites takes lots of bandwidth that we could use for other things, and we have ended up using two different backup applications.” In the future, the team plans to simplify the backup system.

该计划是在第二个数据中心添加另一个DXI，将VM和CIFS共享备份到使用VEEAM的DXI设备，然后使用DXI设备复制数据中心之间的备份数据。“在DXI之间复制备份数据是一个更好的选择。它将使用现在需要的带宽的一小部分 - 小于十分之一 - 它将消除主要阵列现在执行的一个额外工作。“

The new system will leverage integration of the DXi with the Veeam Data Mover to increase performance and support features like synthetic full backup and Instant VM Recovery directly on a DXi appliance. Veeam will also back up the physical servers and create tapes.

“良好的技术让我们简化。DXIS正在获得非常好的DEDUPE汇率，并提供非常有效的复制。Veeam现在可以为VM和物理服务器进行备份，它可以将数据写入CIFS共享和磁带库。我们在去年的经验是veeam和dxi在一起工作。“

有效的服务提供了信心

“Anything we can do to improve operational efficiency is really key to letting us provide better service and keep overall costs as low as possible,” says O’Farrell. Having strong service for critical equipment is one of the important factors, and Quantum has been exemplary.

在一点时，Groton磁带库中的一个驱动器失败并需要更换。“我们有一天叫，Quantum Service Guys第二天早上出现。它们不仅取代了失败的驱动器，而且更换了图书馆中的另一个驱动器。这是伟大的服务。“在另一个场合，量子服务团队正主动地称，确保设备在停电后正确重启。“他们实际上在我们注意到发生了什么并帮助我们恢复工作并干净工作之前叫我们。太好了。”