AFGE Reduces VMware Recovery Times by 80% with TwinStrata CloudArray®, Veeam and Amazon S3 Cloud Storage

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal employee union in the United States, selected TwinStrata’s CloudArray® virtual appliance to provide a seamless extension to cloud storage for its Veeam Backup & Replication software.

Recently, AFGE experienced an acceleration in data growth and associated storage requirements in its server virtualization environment. To understand the impact of virtualization and get a handle on its storage requirements, AFGE carefully considered all of its workload types, including email, video, audio, and small database data, and realized that its storage needs would grow exponentially. AFGE began searching for a simple, affordable and secure offsite backup solution for its VMware infrastructure and decided Cloud Storage was the way to go. It chose Veeam Backup & Replication for its backup software, Amazon S3 as its cloud storage provider and TwinStrata’s CloudArray virtual appliance, which provided a seamless connection to the Veeam backup software via iSCSI and delivered immediate, “like local” access to Amazon cloud storage.

“The decision to move to cloud storage was certainly a lot easier once we discovered CloudArray,” said Taylor Higley, IT director, AFGE. “Now that we know the backup data is successfully and securely going offsite, we can rest easily. With the deployment of CloudArray, we were able to cut our storage costs, reduce data recovery times from one week to one day, and eliminate much of the manual work of handling all those tapes resulting in a savings of one quarter of a FTE.”

In going about their search, AFGE had several primary objectives:

• They were looking for a solution that would backup the entire VMware infrastructure offsite at roughly the same cost of their existing solution (file-level tape backups and transportation to offsite premises)
• They were looking to reduce their VM infrastructure backup recovery time
• They were looking to eliminate any additional capital investments for tape expansion
• They were looking to eliminate the inefficiencies of manual ad-hoc processes that tend to come with tape storage
• They needed to be able to easily expand storage capacity

Since selecting CloudArray, AFGE has experienced no disruption to its existing applications. The Veeam data protection infrastructure remained intact with no requirement for a “rip and replace” of software, no change to policies, and no change to schedules. The DS3 45Mbs network pipe to the cloud ensured optimum off-site backup performance for 3 to 4TB of data.

“With TwinStrata CloudArray, customers like AFGE are able to easily and securely extend Veeam's award-winning, best-in-class backup and replication solution with the availability, flexibility and efficiency of cloud storage,” stated Dan Smith, Federal Sales Director, Veeam.

Next steps for AFGE include evaluating CloudArray for a primary storage solution for specific levels of production data.