Veeam helps Cwm Taf Health Board protect vital infrastructure

In basing its virtual environment on Microsoft Hyper-V, Cwm Taf Health Board replaced its existing, physical server legacy backup tool with Veeam: providing a solution better suited to the health board’s increasingly virtualised IT infrastructure. Cwm Taf Health Board can now ensure that critical capabilities such as clinical applications, healthcare systems and nurse rostering, which serve the needs of almost 300,000 people in South Wales, are consistently backed up. In the event of failure virtual machines and individual items can be recovered in a matter of minutes, rather than days.

“The level of scalability and efficiency it provides means that virtualisation is a crucial technology for us,” said Matthew Palmer, Head of Server Management at Cwm Taf Health Board. “However, with critical applications housed in our virtual environment we need to be confident they will be available 100% of the time. Since our previous backup tool was designed for a physical environment, we did not have the level of capability we needed: simply recovering an individual item could take at least one day, as we had to first restore an entire server. We could also only perform backups once a day, meaning a failure could wipe out up to 24 hours’ worth of work. When we made the decision to implement Hyper-V, we could also start afresh with our backup and recovery: Veeam gave us the capability and confidence we needed.”

Cwm Taf Health Board employs approximately 8,000 people and operates nine hospitals, dozens of pharmacies and 140 medical, dental and optometry practices. It currently has 250 virtual machines (VMs) split between two data centres that represent 60% of its entire server environment. If the services running on these virtual servers were to fail, the health board would be forced to rely on paper-based equivalents, which would decrease efficiency in patient care. In 2012 Cwm Taf Health Board made the decision to base its entire virtual infrastructure on Microsoft Hyper-V to provide a cost-effective, consistent service. It also took the opportunity to change its data protection tool, ensuring it had the backup and recovery capabilities to match. Cwm Taf Health Board chose Veeam thanks to its impressive reputation and proven capability with Microsoft Hyper-V, including the ability to recover individual application items.

Veeam has already proven itself in terms of capability. Backup windows have been reduced, which enables more frequent backup (three times a day) and results in a much lower risk of work being lost forever. Veeam’s ability to recover individual items means these items can be recovered in fewer than five minutes, instead of a day or more. Cwm Taf Health Board is also implementing more of Veeam’s capabilities. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange will give Cwm Taf Health Board the ability to quickly recover mailboxes or individual items for the first time in 10 years. It is also using more of Veeam’s sandbox capabilities: creating a testing area in unused backup storage means that Cwm Taf Health Board can test patches, upgrades and any new solutions they are offered by vendors before putting those into practice in the production environment.

“Veeam has already given us greater confidence in our data protection,” continued Matthew Palmer. “Its sandbox capabilities will also help give us confidence that we are making the best decisions when upgrading or modifying our IT services. We now have an affordable, easy-to-use and highly capable backup and recovery solution that does so much more than simply save and restore our virtual machines. In an increasingly cost-conscious environment, having a single solution that does all of this is a huge benefit.”